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THEY SHALL NOT PASS 



THEY 
SHALL NOT PASS 



BT5 



A 



FRANK H. SIMONDS 

AUTHOR OF "the GREAT WAR" 




Garden City New York 

DOUBLED AY, PAGE & COMPANY 

1916 



.Vsss 



Copyright, 1916, hy 

DOUBLEDAY, PaGE & COMPANY 

All rights reserved, including that of 

translation into foreign languages, 

including the Scandinavian 



COPYRIGHT, 1916, THE TRIBUNE ASS N. 



MAY 27 ISi6 
{e)ni 44:H240 



Grateful acknowledgment is hereby made 
to the New York Tribune for permission 
to reprint these articles in book form. 



CONTENTS 



I. My Trip to Verdun — General 

Petain Face to Face. ... 3 

The men who hold the Hne — what 
their faces told of the past and the fu- 
ture of France. 

II. My Trip to Verdun— A Dying, 

Shell-Ridden City 43 

The Vauban Citadel, in the shelter 
of which falling shells cannot find you 
— houses and blocks that are vanishing 
hourly — "but William will not come" 
— war that is invisible — a luncheon 
underground with a toast to America — 
the last courtesy from a general and a 
host — nothing that was not beautiful. 

III. Battle of Verdun Another Gettys- 
burg 72 

Failure of Crown Prince likened by 
French to "high tide" of confederacy. 



viii CONTENTS 



PAGE 



rV. Verdun, the Door That Leads 

Nowhere 95 

The battle and the topography of 
the battlefield — an analysis of the at- 
tack and defence. 

V. In Sight of the Promised Land — 

on the Lorraine Battlefield . 116 



THEY SHALL NOT PASS 



I 

MY TRIP TO VERDUN— GENERAL 
PETAIN FACE TO FACE 

THE MEN WHO HOLD THE LINE — WHAT THEIR 
FACES TOLD OF THE PAST AND THE FUTURE 
OF FRANCE 

MY ROAD to Verdun ran through the 
Elysee Palace, and it was to the 
courtesy and interest of the Presi- 
dent of the French Republic that I owed my 
opportunity to see the battle for the Meuse 
city at close range. Already through the 
kindness of the French General Staff I had 
seen the Lorraine and Marne battlegrounds 
and had been guided over these fields by 
officers who had shared in the opening bat- 
tles that saved France. But Verdun was 
more difficult; there is little time for caring 
for the wandering correspondent when a de- 

3 



4 THEY SHALL NOT PASS 

cisive contest is going forward, and quite 
naturally the General Staff turned a deaf ear 
to my request. 

Through the kindness of one of the many 
Frenchmen who gave time and effort to 
make my pilgrimage a success I was at last 
able to see M. Poincare. Like our own 
American President, the French Chief Mag- 
istrate is never interviewed, and I mention 
this audience simply because it was one 
more and in a sense the final proof for me of 
the friendliness, the courtesy, the interest 
that the American will find to-day in France. 
I had gone to Paris, my ears filled with the 
warnings of those who told me that it was 
hard to be an American in Europe, in France, 
in the present hour. I had gone expecting, 
or at least fearing, that I should find it so. 

Instead, from peasant to President I 
found only kindness, only gratitude, only 
a profound appreciation for all that Amer- 
icans had individually done for France in 
the hour of her great trial. These things 



THEY SHALL NOT PASS 5 

and one thing more I found: a very intense 
desire that Americans should be able to 
see for themselves; the Frenchman will 
not talk to you of what France has done, 
is doing; he shrinks from anything that 
might suggest the imitation of the Ger- 
man method of propaganda. In so far as 
it is humanly possible he would have you 
see the thing for yourself and testify out of 
your own mouth. 

Thus it came about that all my difficul- 
ties vanished when I had been permitted 
to express to the President my desire to 
see Verdun and to go back to America — I 
was sailing within the week — able to re- 
port what I had seen with my own eyes of 
the decisive battle still going forward around 
the Lorraine city. Without further delay, 
discussion, it was promised that I should go 
to Verdun by motor, that I should go cared 
for by the French military authorities and 
that I should be permitted to see all that 
one could see at the moment of the contest. 



6 THEY SHALL NOT PASS 

We left Paris in the early afternoon; 
my companions were M. Henri Ponsot, 
chief of the Press Service of the Ministry 
of Foreign Affairs, and M. Hugues le Roux, 
a distinguished Frenchman of letters well 
known to many Americans. To start for 
the battlefield from a busy, peaceful city, 
to run for miles through suburbs as quiet 
and lacking in martial aspect as the regions 
beyond the Harlem, at home, was a thing 
that seemed almost unreal; but only for a 
brief moment, for war has come very near to 
Paris, and one may not travel far in Eastern 
France without seeing its signs. 

In less than an hour we were passing 
the rear of the line held by the British at 
the Battle of the Marne, and barely sixty 
minutes after we had passed out through 
the Vincennes gate we met at Courticon 
the first of the ruined villages that for 
two hundred miles line the roadways that 
lead from the capital to Lorraine and Cham- 
pagne. Suddenly in the midst of a peaceful 



THEY SHALL NOT PASS 7 

countryside, after passing a score of undis- 
turbed villages, villages so like one to another, 
you come to one upon which the storm has 
burst, andjinstead of snug houses, smiling faces, 
the air of contentment and happiness that 
was France, there is only a heap of ruins, 
houses with their roofs gone, their walls 
torn by shell fire, villages abandoned par- 
tially or wholly, contemporary Pompeiis, 
overtaken by the Vesuvius of Krupp. 

Coincidentally there appear along the 
roadside, in the fields, among the plough 
furrows, on every side, the crosses that 
mark the graves of those who died for France 
— or for Germany. Along the slope you 
may mark the passage of a charge by these 
crosses; those who fell were buried as they \ 
lay, French and Germans with equal care. I 
Indeed, there is a certain pride visible in all \ 
that the French do for their dead foes. 
Alongside a hamlet wantonly burned, burned 
by careful labor and with German thorough- 
ness; in villages where you will be told of 



8 THEY SHALL NOT PASS 

nameless atrocities and shameful killings, 
you will see the German graves, marked by 
neat crosses, surrounded by sod embank- 
ments, marked with plaques of black and 
white; the French are marked by plaques 
of red, white and blue, and the latter in- 
variably decorated with a flag and flowers. 

Once you have seen these graves by the 
roadside going east you will hardly go a 
mile in two hundred which has not its graves. 
From the environs of Meaux, a scant twenty 
miles from Paris, to the frontier at the Seille, 
beyond Nancy, there are graves and more 
graves, now scattered, now crowded together 
where men fought hand to hand. Passing 
them in a swift-moving auto, they seem to 
march by you; there is the illusion of an army 
advancing on the hillside, until at last, be- 
yond Nancy, where the fighting was so ter- 
rible, about little villages such as Corbessaux, 
you come to the great common graves, 
where a hundred or two hundred men have 
been gathered, where the trenches now 



THEY SHALL NOT PASS 9 

levelled are but long graves, and you read, 
"Here rest 179 French soldiers," or across 
the road, "Here 196 Germans." 

Take a map of France and from a point 
just south of Paris draw a straight line 
to the Vosges; twenty or thirty miles to 
the north draw another. Between the two 
is the black district of the Marne and Nancy 
battles. It is the district of ruined villages, 
destroyed farms; it is the region where every 
hillside — so it will seem to the traveller — 
is marked by these pathetic crosses. It is a 
region in which the sense of death and de- 
struction is abroad. Go forty miles north 
again and draw two more lines, and this is 
the region not of the death and destruction of 
yesterday, but of to-day; this is the front, 
where the graves are still in the making, the 
region of the Oise to the Meuse, from Noyon 
to Verdun. 

On this day our route led eastward through 
the villages which in September, 1914, woke 
from at least a century of oblivion, from the 



10 THEY SHALL NOT PASS 

forgetting that followed Napoleon's last 
campaign in France to a splendid but terri- 
ble ten days: Courtacon, Sezanne, La-Fere 
Champenoise, Vitry-le-Frangois, the region 
where Franchet d'Esperey and Foch fought, 
where the "Miracle of the Marne" was per- 
formed. Mile after mile the countryside 
files by, the never-changing impression of a 
huge cemetery, the hugest in the world, the 
stricken villages, now and then striving 
to begin again, a red roof here and there 
telling of the first counter offensive of peace, 
of construction made against the whirlwind 
that had come and gone. 

Always, too, nothing but old men and 
women, these and children, working in the 
broad fields, still partially cultivated, but 
no longer the fields of that perfectly cared for 
France of the other peace days. Women 
and children at the plough, old men bent 
double by age still spending such strength 
as is left in the tasks that war has set for 
them. ^ This is the France behind the front. 



THEY SHALL NOT PASS 11 

and, aside from the ruined villages and graves, 
the France that stretches from the Pyrenees 
to the Marne, a France from which youth 
and manhood are gone, in which age and 
childhood remain with the women. Yet in 
this land we were passing how much of the 
youth and manhood of France and Germany 
was buried in the graves the crosses demon- 
strated at every kilometre. 

But a hundred miles east of Paris there 
begins a new world. The graves, the shell- 
cursed villages, remain, but this is no longer 
the France of the Marne fighting and of the 
war of two years ago. At Vitry-le-Frangois 
you pass almost without warning into the 
region which is the back of the front to-day, 
the base of all the line of fire from Rheims 
to the Meuse, and suddenly along the road 
appear the canvas guideposts which bear the 
terse warning, "Verdun." You pass sud- 
denly from ancient to contemporary history, 
from the killing of other years to the killing 
that is of to-day — the killing and the wound- 



12 THEY SHALL NOT PASS 

ing — and along the hills where there are still 
graves there begin to appear Red Cross 
tents and signs, and ambulances pass you 
bearing the latest harvest. 

And now every village is a garrison town. 
For a hundred miles there have been only 
women and old men, but now there are only 
soldiers; they fill the streets; they crowd the 
doorways of the houses. The fields are filled 
with tents, with horses, with all the impedi- 
menta of an army. The whole countryside 
is a place of arms. Every branch of French 
service is about you — Tunisians, Turcos, 
cavalry, the black, the brown, and the white 
— the men who yesterday or last week were 
in the first line, who rest and will return 
to-morrow or next day to fight again. 

Unmistakably, too, you feel that this 
is the business of war; you are in a fac- 
tory, a machine shop; if the product is 
death and destruction, it is no less a matter 
of machinery, not of romance, of glamour. 
The back of the front is a place of work 



THEY SHALL NOT PASS 13 

and of rest for more work, but of parade, 
of the brilliant, of the fascinating there 
is just nothing. Men with bright but 
plainly weary faces, not young men, but 
men of thirty and above, hard bitten by 
their experience, patently fit, fed, but some- 
how related to the ruins and the destruction 
around them, they are all about you, and 
wherever now you see a grave you will dis- 
cover a knot of men standing before it talk- 
ing soberly. Wherever you see the vestiges 
of an old trench, a hill that was fought for 
at this time twenty months ago, you will see 
new practice trenches and probably the re- 
cruits, the "Class of 1917," the boys that 
are waiting for the call, listening to an officer 
explaining to them what has been done here, 
the mistake or the good judgment revealed 
by the event. For France is training the 
youth that remains to her on the still recent 
battlefields and in the presence of those who 
died to keep the ground. 

Just as the darkness came we passed St. 



^ 



14 THEY SHALL NOT PASS 

Dizier and entered at last upon the road to 
Verdun, the one road that is the Hfe line of 
the city. For to understand the real prob- 
lem of the defence of Verdun you must 
realize that there is lacking to the city any 
railroad. In September, 1914, the Germans 
took St. Mihiel and cut the railway coming 
north along the Meuse. On their retreat 
from the Marne the soldiers of the Crown 
Prince halted at Montfaucon and Varennes, 
and their cannon have commanded the Paris- 
Verdun-Metz Railroad ever since. Save 
for a crazy narrow-gauge line wandering 
along the hill slopes, climbing by impossible 
grades, Verdun is without rail communica- 
tion. 

It was this that made the defence of 
the town next to impossible. Partially to 
remedy the defect the French had recon- 
structed a local highway running from St. 
Dizier by Bar-le-Duc to Verdun beyond 
the reach of German artillery. To-day an 
army of a quarter of a million of men, the 



THEY SHALL NOT PASS 15 

enormous parks of heavy artillery and field 
guns — everything is supplied by this one road 
and by motor transport. 

Coming north from St. Dizier we entered 
this vast procession. Mile after mile the 
caravan stretched on, fifty miles with hardly 
a break of a hundred feet between trucks. 
Paris 'buses, turned into vehicles to bear 
fresh meat; new motor trucks built to carry 
thirty-five men and travelling in companies, 
regiments, brigades; wagons from the hood 
of which soldiers, bound to replace the killed 
and wounded of yesterday, looked down upon 
you, calmly but unsmilingly. From St. 
Dizier to Verdun the impression was of 
that of the machinery by which logs are 
carried to the saw in a mill. You felt un- 
consciously, yet unmistakably, that you 
were looking, not upon automobiles, not 
upon separate trucks, but upon some vast 
and intricate system of belts and benches 
that were steadily, swiftly, surely carry- 
ing all this vast material, carrying men 



16 THEY SHALL NOT PASS 

and munitions and supplies, everything 
human and inanimate, to that vast grind- 
ing mill which was beyond the hills, the 
crushing machine which worked with equal 
remorselessness upon men and upon things. 

Now and again, too, over the hills came 
the Red Cross ambulances; they passed 
you returning from the front and bring- 
ing within their carefully closed walls the 
finished product, the fruits of the day's 
grinding, or a fraction thereof. And about 
the whole thing there was a sense of the 
mechanical rather than the human, some- 
thing that suggested an automatic, a ma- 
chine-driven, movement; it was as if an 
unseen system of belts and engines and 
levers guided, moved, propelled this long 
procession upward and ever toward the mys- 
terious front where the knives or the axes 
or the grinding stones did their work. 

Night came down upon us along the 
road and brought a new impression. Mile 
on mile over the hills and round the curves. 



THEY SHALL NOT PASS 17 

disappearing in the woods, reappearing on 
the distant summits of the hills, each show- 
ing a rear light that wagged crazily on the 
horizon, this huge caravan flowed onward, 
while in the villages and on the hillsides 
campfires flashed up and the faces or the 
figures of the soldiers could be seen now 
clearly and now dimly. But all else was 
subordinated to the line of moving transports. 
Somewhere far off at one end of the procession 
there was battle; somewhere down below at 
the other end there was peace. There all 
the resources, the life blood, the treasure in 
men and in riches of France were concen- 
trating and collecting, were being fed into 
this motor fleet, which like baskets on ropes 
was carrying it forward to the end of the 
line and then bringing back what remained, 
or for the most part coming back empty, for 
more — for more lives and more treasure. 

It was full night when our car came 
down the curved grades into Bar-le-Duc, 
halted at the corner, where soldiers per- 



18 THEY SHALL NOT PASS 

formed the work of traffic policemen and 
steadily guided the caravan toward the 
road marked by a canvas sign lighted within 
by a single candle and bearing the one word, 
"Verdun." All night, too, the rumble of the 
passing transport filled the air and the little 
hotel shook with the jar of the heavy trucks, 
for neither by day nor by night is there a 
halt in the motor transport, and the sound 
of this grinding is never low. 

It was little more than daylight when 
we took the road again, with a thirty-mile 
drive to Verdun before us. Almost im- 
mediately we turned into the Verdun route 
we met again the caravan of automobiles, 
of camions, as the French say. It still 
flowed on without break. Now, too, we 
entered the main road, the one road to 
Verdun, the road that had been built by 
the French army against just such an at- 
tack as was now in progress. The road 
was as wide as Fifth Avenue, as smooth 
as asphalt — a road that, when peace comes, 



THEY SHALL NOT PASS 19 

if it ever does, will delight the motorist. 
Despite the traffic it had to bear, it was 
in perfect repair, and soldiers in uniform 
sat by the side brealdng stone and pre- 
paring metal to keep it so. 

The character of the country had now 
changed. We were entering the region of 
the hills, between the Aisne and the Meuse, 
a country reminiscent of New England. 
Those hills are the barrier which beyond 
the Meuse, under the names of the Cote 
de Meuse, have been the scene of so much 
desperate fighting. The roads that sidled 
off to the east bore battle names, St. Mihiel, 
Troy on, and the road that we followed was 
still marked at every turn with the magic 
word "Verdun." Our immediate objective 
was Souilly, the obscure hill town twenty 
miles, perhaps, south of the front, from which 
Sarrail had defended Verdun in the Marne 
days and from which Petain was now de- 
fending Verdun against a still more terrible 
attack. 



go THEY SHALL NOT PASS 

And in France to-day one speaks only 
of Verdun and Petain. Soldiers have their 
day; Joffre, Castelnau, Foch, all retain 
much of the affection and admiration they 
have deserved, but at the moment it is 
the man who has held Verdun that France 
thinks of, and there was the promise for 
us that at Souilly we should see the man 
whose fame had filled the world in the 
recent great and terrible weeks. Upward 
and downward over the hills, through more 
ruined villages, more hospitals, more camps, 
our march took us until after a short hour 
we came to Souilly, general headquarters of 
the Army of Verdun, of Petain, the centre 
of the world for the moment. 

Few towns have done less to prepare for 
greatness than Souilly. It boasts a single 
street three inches deep in the clay mud 
of the spring — a single street through which 
the Verdun route marches almost contemp- 
tuously, the same nest of stone and plaster 
houses, one story high, houses from which 



THEY SHALL NOT PASS £1 

the owners had departed to make room for 
generals and staff officers. This and one 
thing more, the Mairie, the town hall, as 
usual the one pretentious edifice of the French 
hamlet, and before the stairway of this we 
stopped and got out. 

We were at headquarters. From this 
little building, devoted for perhaps a cen- 
tury to the business of governing the com- 
mune of Souilly, with its scant thousand 
of people, Petain was defending Verdun 
and the fate of an army of 250,000 men 
at the least. In the upstairs room, where 
the town councillors had once debated 
parochial questions, Joffre and Castelnau 
and Petain in the terrible days of the open- 
ing conflict had consulted, argued, decided 
— decided the fate of France, so the Ger- 
mans had said, for they had made the fall 
of Verdun the assurance of French col- 
lapse. 

Unconsciously, too, you felt the change 
in the character of the population of this 



22 THEY SHALL NOT PASS 

village. There were still the soldiers, the 
eternal gray-blue uniforms, but there were 
also men of a different type, men of au- 
thority. In the street your guides pointed 
out to you General Herr, the man who had 
designed and planned and accomplished 
the miracle of the motor transport that 
had saved Verdun — with the aid of the 
brave men fighting somewhere not far be- 
yond the nearest hills. He had commanded 
at Verdun when the attack came, and with- 
out hesitation he had turned over his com- 
mand to Petain, his junior in service and 
rank before the war, given up the glory 
and become the superintendent of trans- 
port. Men spoke to you of the fine loyalty 
of that action with unconcealed admira- 
tion. 

And then out of the remoteness of Souilly 
there came a voice familiar to an American. 
Bunau-Varilla, the man of Panama, wearing 
the uniform of a commandant and the Croix 
de Guerre newly bestowed for some wonderful 



THEY SHALL NOT PASS 23 

engineering achievement, stepped forward 
to ask for his friends and yours of the old 
''Sun paper." I had seen him last in the 
Sun office in the days when the war had 
just broken out and he was about to sail 
for home; in the days when the Marne 
was still unfought and he had breathed 
hope then as he spoke with confidence 
now. 

Presently there arrived the two officers 
whose duty it was to take me to Verdun, 
Captain Henrif Bourdeaux, a man of let- 
ters known to all Frenchmen; Captain 
Madelin, an historian, already documented 
in the history of the war making under 
his own eyes. To these gentlemen and their 
colleagues who perform this task that can 
hardly be agreeable, who risk their lives and 
give over their time with unfailing courtesy 
and consideration that the American news- 
paper correspondent may see, may report, 
it is impossible to return sufficient thanks, 
and every American newspaper reader who 



24 THEY SHALL NOT PASS 

finds on his breakfast table the journal that 
tells him of the progress of the war owes 
something to some officer. 

"Were we to see Verdun?" This was 
the first problem. I had been warned two 
days before that the bombardment was 
raging and that it was quite possible that 
it would be unsafe to go farther. But the 
news was reassuring; Verdun was tran- 
quil. "And Petain.^" One could not yet 
say. 

Even as we spoke there was a stirring 
in the crowd, general saluting, and I caught 
a glimpse of the commander-in-chief as he 
went quickly up the staircase. For the rest 
we must wait. But not for very long; in a 
few minutes there came the welcome word 
that General Petain would see us, would see 
the stray American correspondent. 

Since I saw Petain in the little Mairie 
at Souilly I have seen many photographs 
of him, but none in any real measure give 
the true picture of the defender of Verdun. 



THEY SHALL NOT PASS 25 

He saw us in his office, the bare upstairs 
room, two years ago the office of the Mayor of 
Souilly. Think of the Selectmen's office in 
any New England village and the picture 
will be accurate: a bare room, a desk, one 
chair, a telephone, nothing on the walls but 
two maps, one of the military zone, one of the 
actual front and positions of the Verdun 
fighting. A bleak room, barely heated by 
the most primitive of stoves. From the 
single window one looked down on the cheer- 
less street along which lumberec? the caravan 
of autos. On the pegs against the wall 
hung the General's hat and coat, weather- 
stained, faded, the clothes of a man who 
worked in all weathers. Of staff officers, 
of uniforms, of color there was just noth- 
ing; of war there was hardly a hint. 

At the door the commander-in-chief met 
us, shook hands, and murmured clearly and 
slowly, with incisive distinctness, the for- 
mal words of French greeting; he spoke 
no English. Instantly there was the sug- 



26 THEY SHALL NOT PASS 

gestion of Kitchener, not of Kitchener as 
you see him in flesh, but in photographs, 
the same coldness, decision. The smile 
that accompanied the words of welcome 
vanished and the face was utterly motion- 
less, expressionless. You saw a tall, broad- 
shouldered man, with every appearance of 
physical strength, a clear blue eye, looking 
straight forward and beyond. 

My French companion, M. Le Roux, spoke 
with Petain. He had just come from Joffre 
and he told an interestmj circumstance. 
Petain listened. He said now and then 
"yes" or "no." Nothing more. Watching 
him narrowly you saw that occasionally his 
eyes twitched a little, the single sign of 
fatigue that the long strain of weeks of re- 
sponsibility had brought. 

It was hard to believe, looking at this 
quiet, calm, silent man, that you were in 
the presence of the soldier who had won 
the Battle of Champagne, the man whom 
the war had surprised in the last of his 



THEY SHALL NOT PASS 27 

fifties, a Colonel, a teacher of war rather 
than a soldier, a professor like Foch. 

No one of Napoleon's marshals had com- 
manded as many men as obeyed this French- 
man, who was as lacking in the distinction 
of military circumstance as our own Grant. 
Napoleon had won all his famous victories 
with far fewer troops than were directed 
from the telephone on the table yonder. 

Every impression of modern war that 
comes to one actually in touch with it is a 
destruction of illusion: this thing is a thing 
of mechanism rather than of brilliance; 
perhaps Petain has led a regiment, a brigade, 
or a division to the charge. You knew in- 
stinctively in seeing the man that you would 
go or come, as he said, but there was neither 
dash nor fire, nothing of the suggestion of 
elan; rather there was the suggestion of the 
commander of a great ocean liner, the man 
respX)nsible for the lives, this time of hundreds 
of thousands, not scores, for the safety of 
France, not of a ship, but the man of ma- 



28 THEY SHALL NOT PASS 

chinery and the master of the wisdom of the 
tides and the weather, not the Ney, or the 
Murat, not the Napoleon of Areola. The 
impression was of a strong man whose life 
was a life beaten upon by storms; the man 
on the bridge, to keep to the rather ridicu- 
lously inadequate figure, but not by any 
chance the man on horseback. 

My talk, our talk with Petain was the 
matter of perhaps five minutes. The time 
was consumed by the words of M. Le Roux, 
who spoke very earnestly urging that more 
American correspondents be permitted to 
visit Verdun, and Petain heard him patiently, 
but said just nothing. Once he had greeted 
us his face settled into that grim expression 
that never changed until he smiled his word 
of good wishes as we left. Yet I have since 
found that apart from one circumstance which 
I shall mention in a moment I have remem- 
bered those minutes most clearly of all of 
my Verdun experience. Just as the photo- 
graph does not reveal the face of the man, the 



THEY SHALL NOT PASS 29 

word does not describe the sense of strength, 
of responsibility, that he gives. 

In a childish sort of way, exactly as one 
thinks of war as a matter of dash and color 
and motion, one thinks of the French general 
as the leader of a cavalry charge or of a for- 
lorn hope of infantry. And the French 
soldier of this war has not been the man of 
charge or of dash — not that he has not 
charged as well as ever in his history, a little 
more bravely, perhaps, for machine guns are 
new and something worse than other wars 
have had. What the French soldier has 
done has been to stand, to hold, to die not 
in the onrush but on the spot. 

And Petain in some curious way has 
fixed in my mind the impression of the new 
Frenchman, if there be a new one, or per- 
haps better of the French soldier of to-day, 
whether he wear the stars of the general or 
undecorated *' horizon" blue of the Poilu. 
The look that I saw in his eyes, the calm, 
steady, utterly emotionless looking straight 



30 THEY SHALL NOT PASS 

forward, I saw everywhere at the front and 
at the back of the front. It embodied for 
me an enduring impression of the spirit and 
the poise of the French soldier of the latest 
and most terrible of French struggles. And 
I confess that, more than all I saw and heard 
at the front and in Paris, the look of this 
man convinced me that Verdun would not 
fall, that France herself would not either 
weary or weaken. 

In Paris, where one may hear anything, 
there are those that will tell you that Joffre's 
work is done and that France waits for the 
man who will complete the task; that the 
strain of the terrible months has wearied the 
general who won the Battle of the Marne 
and saved France. They wijl tell you, 
perhaps, that Petain is the man; they will 
certainly tell you that they hope that the 
man has been found in Petain. As to the 
truth of all this I do not pretend to know. I 
did not see Joffre, but all that I have read of 
Joffre suggests that Petain is of his sort, the 



THEY SHALL NOT PASS 31 

same quiet, silent man, with a certain cold- 
ness of the North, a grimness of manner that 
is lacking in his chief. 

There was a Ejtchener legend in Europe, 
and I do not think it survives save a little 
perhaps in corners of England. There was 
a legend of a man of ice and of iron, a man 
who made victory out of human material as 
a man makes a wall of mortar and stone, a 
man to whom his material was only mortar 
and stone, even though it were human. This 
legend has perished so far as Kitchener is 
concerned, gone with so much that England 
trusted and believed two years ago, but I 
find myself thinking now of Petain as we all 
thought of Kitchener in his great day. 

If I were an officer I should not like to 
come to the defender of Verdun with the 
confession of failure. I think I should rather 
meet the Bavarians in the first line trenches, 
but I should like to know that when I was 
obeying orders I was carrying out a minor 
detail of something Petain had planned; I 



32 THEY SHALL NOT PASS 

should expect it to happen, the thing that he 
had arranged, and I should feel that those 
clear, steel-blue eyes had foreseen all that 
could occur, foreseen calmly and utterly, 
whether it entailed the death of one or a 
thousand men, of ten thousand men if nec- 
essary, and had willed that it should happen. 
I do not believe Napoleon's Old Guard 
would have followed Petain as they followed 
Ney. I cannot fancy him in the Imperial 
uniform, and yet, now that war is a thing of 
machines, of telephones, of indirect fire and 
^destruction from unseen weapons at remote 
ranges, now that the whole manner and cir- 
cumstance of conflict have changed, it is but 
natural that the General should change, too. 
Patently Petain is of the new, not the old, 
but no less patently he was the master of 
it. 

We left the little Mairie, entered our 
machines and slid out swiftly for the last 
miles, climbed and curved over the final 
hill and suddenly looked down on a deep, 



THEY SHALL NOT PASS 33 

trenchlike valley marching from east to 
west and carrying the Paris-Verdun-Metz 
Railroad, no longer available for traffic. And 
as we coasted down the hill we heard the 
guns at last, not steadily, but only from time 
to time, a distant boom, a faint billowing up 
of musketry fire. Some three or four miles 
straight ahead there were the lines of fire 
beyond the brown hills that flanked the 
valley. 

At the bottom of the valley we turned 
east, moved on for a mile, and stopped 
abruptly. The guns were sounding more 
clearly, and suddenly there was a sense not 
of soldiers, but of an army. On one side 
of the road a column was coming toward 
us, a column of men who were leaving the 
trenches for a rest, the men who for the 
recent days had held the first line. Wear- 
ily but steadily they streamed by; the mud 
of the trenches covered their tunics; here 
and there a man had lost his steel helmet 
and wore a handkerchief about his head, 



34 THEY SHALL NOT PASS 

probably to conceal a slight wound that 
but for the helmet had killed him. 

These men were smiling as they marched; 
they carried their full equipment and it 
rattled and tinkled; they carried their guns 
at all angles, they wore their uniforms in 
the strangest of disorders; they seemed al- 
most like miners coming from the depths 
of the earth rather than soldiers returning 
from a decisive battle, from the hell of mod- 
ern shell fire. 

But it was the line on the other side of 
the road that held the eye. Here were the 
troops that were going toward the fire, 
toward the trenches, that were marching 
to the sound of the guns, and as one saw 
them the artillery rumble took on a new 
distinctness. 

Involuntarily I searched the faces of these 
men as they passed. They were hardly 
ten feet from me. Platoon after platoon, 
company after company, whole regiments in 
columns of fours. And seeing the faces 



THEY SHALL NOT PASS 35 

brought an instant shock; they all wore the 
same calm, steady, slightly weary expression, 
but there was in the whole line scarcely a 
young man. Here were men of the thirties, 
not the twenties; men still in the prime of 
strength, of health, but the fathers of families, 
the men of full manhood. 

Almost in a flash the fact came home. 
This was what all the graves along the 
road had meant. This was what the bat- 
tlefields and the glories of the twenty months 
had spelled — France had sent her youth and 
it was spent; she was sending her manhood 
now. 

In the line no man smiled and no man 
straggled; the ranks were closed up and 
there were neither commands nor any visi- 
ble sign of authority. These men who were 
marching to the sound of the guns had 
been there before. They knew precisely 
what it meant. Yet you could not but feel 
that as they went a little wearily, sadly, 
they marched willingly. They would not 



36 THEY SHALL NOT PASS 

have it otherwise. Their faces were the 
faces of men who had taken the full measure 
of their own fate. 

You had a sense of the loathing, the 
horror, above all the sadness that was in 
their hearts that this thing, this war, this 
destruction had to be. They had come back 
here through all the waste of ruined villages 
and shell-torn hillsides; all the men that you 
saw would not measure the cost of a single 
hour of trench fighting if the real attack 
began. This these men knew, and the mes- 
sage of the artillery fire, which was only 
one of unknown terrors for you, was intelli- 
gible to the utmost to each of them. 

And yet with the weariness there was a 
certain resignation, a certain patience, a 
certain sense of comprehending sacrifice 
that more than all else is France to-day, 
the true France. This, and not the empty 
forts, not even the busy guns, was the wall 
that defended France, this line of men. If 
it broke there would come thundering down 



THEY SHALL NOT PASS 37 

again out of the north all the tornado of 
destruction that had turned Northeastern 
France into a waste place and wrecked so 
much of the world's store of the beautiful 
and the inspiring. 

Somehow you felt that this was in the 
minds of all these men. They had willed to 
die that France might live. They were go- 
ing to a death that sounded ever more 
clearly as they marched. This death had 
eaten up all that was young, most of what 
was young at the least, of France; it might 
yet consume France, and so these men 
marched to the sound of the guns, not to 
martial music, not with any suggestion of 
dash, of enthusiasm, but quietly, steadily, 
all with the same look upon their faces — 
the look of men who have seen death and 
are to see it again. Instinctively I thought ' 
of what Kipling had said to me in London: 

"Somewhere over there," he had said, 
"the thing will suddenly grip your throat 
and your heart; it will take hold of you 



38 THEY SHALL NOT PASS 

as nothing in your life has ever done or 
ever will." And I know that I never shall 
forget those lines of quiet, patient, middle- 
aged men marching to the sound of the guns, 
leaving at their backs the countless graves 
that hold the youth of France, the men who 
had known the Marne, the Yser, Champagne, 
who had known death for nearly two years, 
night and day, almost constantly. Yet 
during the fifteen minutes I watched there 
was not one order, not one straggler; there 
was a sense of the regularity with which the 
blood flows through the human arteries in 
this tide, and it was the blood of France. 

So many people have asked me, I had 
asked myself, the question before I went 
to France: "Are they not weary of it.^ Will 
the French not give up from sheer exhaustion 
of strength.?" I do not think so, now that 
I have seen the faces of these hundreds of 
men as they marched to the trenches beyond 
Verdun. France may bleed to death, but I 
do not think that while there are men there 



THEY SHALL NOT PASS 39 

will be an end of the sacrifice. No pen or 
voice can express the horror that these men, 
that all Frenchmen, have of this war, of all 
war, the weariness. They hate it; you cannot 
mistake this; but France marches to the 
frontier in the spirit that men manned the 
walls against the barbarians in the other 
days; there is no other way; it must be. 

Over and over again there has come the 
invariable answer; it would have come from 
scores and hundreds of these men who passed 
so near me I could have touched their faded 
uniforms if I had asked — "It is for France, 
for civilization; it must be, for there is no 
other way; we shall die, but with us, with our 
sacrifice, perhaps this thing will end." You 
cannot put it in words quite, I do not think 
even any Frenchman has quite said it, but you 
can see it, you can feel it, you can under- 
stand it, when you see a regiment, a bri- 
gade, a division of these men of thirty, some 
perhaps of forty, going forward to the war 
they hate and will never quiet until that 



40 THEY SHALL NOT PASS 

which they love is safe or they and all of their 
race are swallowed up in the storm that now 
was audibly beating beyond the human walls 
on the nearby hillsides. 

Presently we moved again, we slipped 
through the column, topped the last incline, 
shot under the crumbling gate of the Verdun 
fortress, and as we entered a shell burst just 
behind us and the roar drowned out all else 
in its sudden and paralyzing crash. It had 
fallen, so we learned a little later, just where 
we had been watching the passing troops; 
it had fallen among them and killed. But 
an hour or two later, when we repassed the 
point where it fell, men were still marching 
by. Other regiments of men were still march- 
ing to the sound of the guns, and those who 
had passed were already over the hills and 
beyond the river, filing into the trenches in 
time, so it turned out, to meet the new at- 
tack that came with the later afternoon. 

I went to Verdun to see the forts, the city, 
the hills, and the topography of a great bat- 



THEY SHALL NOT PASS 41' 

tie; I went in the hope of describing with a 
little of clarity what the operation meant as 
a military affair. I say, and I shall hereafter 
try to describe this. But I shall never be 
able to describe this thing which was the 
true Verdun for me — these men, their faces, 
seen as one heard the shell fire and the 
musketry rolling, not steadily but inter- 
mittently, the men who had marched over 
the roads that are lined with graves, through 
villages that are destroyed, who had come of 
their own will and in calm determination and 
marched unhurryingly and yet unshrink- 
ingly, the men who were no longer young, 
who had left behind them all that men 
hold dear in life, home, wives, children, 
because they knew that there was no other 
way. 

I can only say to all those who have asked 
me, "What of France.^" this simple thing, 
that I do not believe the French will ever 
stop. I do not believe, as the Germans have 
said, that French courage is weakening, that 



42 THEY SHALL NOT PASS 

French determination is abating. I do not 
believe the Kaiser himself would think this 
if he had seen these men's faces as they 
marched toward his guns. I think he would 
feel as I felt, as one must feel, that these men 
went willingly, hating war with their whole 
soul, destitute of passion or anger. I never 
heard a passionate word in France, be- 
cause there had entered into their minds, 
into the mind and heart of a whole race, 
the belief that what was at stake was the 
thing that for two thousand years of his- 
tory had been France. 



II 

MY TRIP TO VERDUN— A DYING, 
SHELL-RIDDEN CITY 

THE VAUBAN CITADEL, IN THE SHELTER OF 
WHICH FALLING SHELLS CANNOT FIND YOU 
— HOUSES AND BLOCKS THAT ARE VAN- 
ISHING HOURLY — "but WILLIAM WILL 
NOT come" — WAR THAT IS INVISI- 
BLE — ^A LUNCHEON UNDERGROUND 
WITH A TOAST TO AMERICA — THE 
LAST COURTESY FROM A GEN- 
ERAL AND A HOST — NOTH- 
ING THAT WAS NOT 
BEAUTIFUL 

THE citadel of Verdun, the bulwark of 
the eastern frontier in ancient days, 
rises out of the meadows of theMeuse 
with something of the abruptness of the sky- 
scraper, and still preserves that aspect which 
led the writers of other wars to describe all 

43 



44 THEY SHALL NOT PASS 

forts as "frowning." It was built for Louis 
XIV by Vauban. He took a solid rock and 
blasted out redoubts and battlements. The 
generations that followed him dug into the 
living rock and created within it a whole 
city of catacombs, a vast labyrinth of passages 
and chambers and halls; even an elevator 
was added by the latest engineers, so that 
one can go from floor to floor, from the level 
of the meadow to the level of the summit of 
the rock, possibly a hundred feet above. 

By reason of the fact that many corre- 
spondents have visited this fortress since the 
war began the world has come to know of the 
underground life in Verdun, to think of the 
city as defended by some wonderful system 
of subterranean works; to think of Verdun, 
in fact, as a city or citadel that is defensible 
either by walls or by forts. But the truth 
is far different: even the old citadel is but a 
deserted cave; its massive walls of natural 
rock resist the shells as they would repulse 
an avalanche; but the guns that were once 



THEY SHALL NOT PASS 45 

on its parapets are gone, the garrison is gone, 
gone far out on the trench Hnes beyond the 
hills. The Vauban citadel is now a place 
where bread is baked, where wounded men 
are occasionally brought, where live the 
soldiers and oflScers whose important but 
unromantic mission it is to keep the roads 
through the town open, to police the ashes of 
the city, to do what remains of the work that 
once fell to the lot of the civil authorities. 

To glide swiftly to the shelter of this rock 
from a region in which a falling shell has 
served to remind you of the real meaning of 
Verdun of the moment, to leave the automo- 
bile and plunge into the welcome obscurity 
of this cavern — this was perhaps the most 
comfortable personal incident of the day. 
The mere shadow of the rock gave a sense of 
security; to penetrate it was to pass to safety. 

Some moments of wandering by corridors 
and stairways into the very heart of the rock 
brought us to the quarters of our host. Gen- 
eral Dubois; to his kind attention I was to 



46 THEY SHALL NOT PASS 

owe all my good fortune in seeing his dying 
city; to him, at the end, I was to owe the ulti- 
mate evidence of courtesy, which I shall never 
forget. 

Unlike Petain or Joffre, General Dubois 
is a little man, possibly a trifle older than 
either. A white-haired, bright-eyed, vigor- 
ous soldier, who made his real fame in Mada- 
gascar with Joffre and with Gallieni, and 
when the storm broke was sent to Verdun 
by these men, who knew him, to do the diffi- 
cult work that there was to be performed 
behind the battle line. There is about Gen- 
eral Dubois a suggestion of the old, as well 
as the new, of the French general. The pri- 
vate soldiers to whom he spoke as he went 
his rounds responded with a "Oui, mon 
General" that had a note of affection as well 
as of discipline; he was rather as one fancied 
were the soldiers of the Revolution, of the 
Empire, of the Algerian days of Pere Bugeaud 
whose memory is still green. 

Our salutations made, we returned through 



THEY SHALL NOT PASS 47 

the winding corridors to inspect the bakeries, 
the water and Kght plant, the unsuspected 
resources of this rock. In one huge cavern 
we saw the men who provided 30,000 men 
with bread each day, men working as the 
stokers in an ocean steamer labor amidst the 
glare of fires; we tasted the bread and found 
it good, as good as all French bread is, and 
that means a little better than all other 
bread. 

Then we slipped back into daylight and 
wandered along the face of the fortress. 
We inspected shell holes of yesterday and 
of last month; we inspected them as one in- 
spects the best blossoms in a garden; we 
studied the angle at which they dropped; 
we measured the miniature avalanche that 
they brought with them. But always, so 
far, there was the subconscious sense of 
the rock between us and the enemy. I never 
before understood the full meaning of that 
phrase "a rock in a weary land." 

All this was but preliminary, however. 



48 THEY SHALL NOT PASS 

Other automobiles arrived; the General en- 
tered one. I followed in the next and we 
set out to visit Verdun, to visit the ruins, 
or, rather, to see not a city that was dead, 
but a city that was visibly, hourly dying — 
a city that was vanishing by blocks and 
by squares — but was not yet fallen to the 
estate of Ypres or Arras; a city that in cor- 
ners, where there were gardens behind the 
walls, still smiled; a city where some few 
brave old buildings still stood four square 
and solid, but only waiting what was to 
come. 

Before I visited Verdun I had seen many 
cities and towns which had been wholly or 
partially destroyed, either by shell fire or by 
the German soldiers in their great invasion 
before the Marne. One shelled town is much 
like another, and there is no thrill quite like 
that you experience when you see the first. 
But these towns had died nearly two years 
ago; indeed, in most the resurrection had 
begun: little red roofs were beginning to shine 



THEY SHALL NOT PASS 49 

through the brown trees and stark ruins. 
Children played again in the squares. It was 
like the sense you have when you see an old 
peasant ploughing among the cross-marked 
graves of a hard-fought battle corner — the 
sense of a beginning as well as of death and 
destruction. 

But at Verdun it was utterly different. 
Of life, or people, of activity beginning 
again or surviving there was nothing. Some 
time in the recent past all the little people 
who lived in these houses had put upon wag- 
ons what could be quickly moved and had 
slipped out of their home, that was already 
under sentence of death. They were gone 
into the distance, and they had left behind 
them no stragglers. The city was empty save 
for a few soldiers who passed rapidly along 
the streets, as one marches in a heavy snow- 
storm. 

Yet Verdun was not wholly dead. Shell 
fire is the most inexplicable of all things 
that carry destruction. As you passed down 



50 THEY SHALL NOT PASS 

one street the mark of destruction varied 
with each house. Here the blast had come 
and cut the building squarely; it had carried 
with it into ruin behind in the courtyard all 
that the house contained, but against the wall 
the telephone rested undisturbed; pictures 
— possibly even a looking glass — hung as the 
inhabitants had left it, hung as perhaps it 
had hung when the last woman had taken her 
ultimate hurried glance at her hat before 
she departed into the outer darkness. 

But the next house had lost only the 
front walls; it stood before you as if it had 
been opened for your inspection by the re- 
moval of the fagade. Chairs, beds — all the 
domestic economy of the house — sagged 
visibly outward toward the street, or stood 
still firm, but open to the four winds. It was 
as if the scene were prepared for a stage and 
you sat before the footlights looking into the 
interior. Again, the next house and that 
beyond were utterly gone — side walls, front 
walls, everything swallowed up and van- 



THEY SHALL NOT PASS 51 

ished — the iron work twisted into heaps, the 
stone work crumbled to dust; the whole mass 
of ruin still smoked, for it was a shell of yester- 
day that had done this work. 

Down on the Riviera, where the mistral 
blows — all the pine trees lean away from 
the invariable track of this storm wind — 
you have the sense, even in the summer 
months, of a whole countryside bent by 
the gales. In the same fashion you felt 
in Verdun, felt rather than saw, a whole 
town not bent, but crumbled, crushed — and 
the line of fall was always apparent; you 
could tell the direction from which each 
storm of shells had come, you could almost 
feel that the storm was but suspended, not 
over, that at any moment it might begin 
again. 

Yet even in the midst of destruction 
there were enclaves of unshaken structures. 
On the Rue Mazel, "Main Street," the 
chief clothing store rose immune amid ashes 
on all sides. Its huge plate-glass window 



52 THEY SHALL NOT PASS 

was not even cracked. And behind the win- 
dow a little mannikin, one of the familiar 
images that wear clothes to tempt the pur- 
chaser, stood erect. A French soldier had 
crept in and raised the stiff arm of the manni- 
kin to the salute, pushed back the hat to a 
rakish angle. The mannikin seemed alive 
and more than alive, the embodiment of the 
spirit of the place. Facing northward toward 
the German guns it seemed to respond to 
them with a " morituri sahitamus/' " The last 
civilian in Verdun," the soldiers called him, 
but his manner was rather that of the Poilu. 
We crossed the river and the canal and 
stopped by the ruin of what had once been 
a big factory or warehouse. We crawled 
through an open shell-made breach in the 
brick wall and stood in the interior. The 
ashes were still hot, and in corners there 
were smoking fires. Two days ago, at just 
this time, your guides told you, men had been 
working here; making bread, I think. At the 
same time we had come to the ruins — the 



THEY SHALL NOT PASS 53 

same time of day, that is — the Germans had 
dropped a half-dozen incendiary shells into 
the building and it had burned in ten min- 
utes. Most of the men who had been there 
then were still there, under the smoking mass 
of wreckage; the smell of burned human flesh 
was in the air. 

A few steps away there was a little house 
standing intact. On the floor there were 
stretched four rolls of white cloth. The Gen- 
eral and those with him took off their hats as 
they entered. He opened one of the pack- 
ages and you saw only a charred black mass, 
something that looked like a half-burned log 
taken from the fireplace. But two days ago 
it had been a man, and the metal disk of 
identification had already been found and 
had served to disclose the victim's name. 
These were the first bodies that had been re- 
moved from the ruins. 

Taking our cars again we drove back and 
stopped before the Mairie, and passing under 
the arch entered the courtyard. The build- 



54 THEY SHALL NOT PASS 

ing had fared better than most, but there 
were many shell marks. In the courtyard 
were four guns. Forty-six years before an- 
other German army had come down from the 
North, another whirlwind of artillery had 
struck the town and laid it in ashes, but even 
under the ashes the town had held out for 
three weeks. Afterward the Republic of 
France had given these guns to the people of 
Verdun in recognition of their heroism. 

In the courtyard I was presented to a man 
wearing the uniform and helmet of a fireman. 
He was the chief of the Verdun fire depart- 
ment. His mission, his perilous duty, it was 
to help extinguish the fires that flamed up 
after every shell. In all my life I have never 
seen a man at once so crushed and so patently 
courageous. He was not young, but his blue 
Lorraine eyes were still clear. Yet he looked 
at you, he looked out upon the world with 
undisguised amazement. For a generation 
his business had been to fight fires. He had 
protected his little town from conflagrations 



THEY SHALL NOT PASS 55 

that might sometimes, perhaps once, possibly 
twice, have risen to the dignity of a "three 
alarm." For the rest he had dealt with 
blazes. 

Now out of the skies and the darkness 
and out of the daylight, too, fire had de- 
scended upon his town. Under an ava- 
lanche of incendiary shells, under a landslide 
of fire, his city was melting visibly into ashes. 
He had lived fire and dreamed fire for half a 
century, but now the world had turned to 
fire — his world — and he looked out upon it in 
dazed wonder. He could no longer fight this 
fire, restrain it, conquer it; he could only go 
out under the bursting shells and strive to 
minimize by some fraction the destruction; 
but it wa^ only child's play, this work of his 
which had been a man's business. And 
there was no mistaking the fact that this 
world was now too much for him. He was 
a brave man; they told me of things he had 
done; but his little cosmos had gone to chaos 
utterly. 



56 THEY SHALL NOT PASS 

We entered our cars again and went to 
another quarter of the city. Everywhere 
w]^ere ashes and ruin, but everywhere the 
sense of a destruction that was progressive, 
not complete: it still marched. It was as 
Arras had been, they told me, before the last 
wall had tumbled and the Artois capital 
had become nothing but a memory. We 
climbed the slope toward the cathedral and 
stopped in a little square still unscathed, the 
Place d'Armes, the most historic acre of the 
town. After a moment I realized what my 
friends were telling me. It was in this square 
that the Crown Prince was to receive the sur- 
render of the town. Along the road we had 
climbed he was to lead his victorious army 
through the town and out the Porte de France 
beyond. In this square the Kaiser was to 
stand and review the army, to greet his vic- 
torious son. The scene as it had been ar- 
ranged was almost rehearsed for you in the 
gestures of the French officers. 

"But William has not come," they said, 



THEY SHALL NOT PASS 57 

"and he will not come now." This last was 
not spoken as a boast, but as a faith, a con- 
viction. 

Still climbing we came to the cathedral. It 
is seated on the very top pinnacle of the 
rock of Verdun, suggesting the French cities 
of Provence. Its two towers, severe and 
lacking ornamentation, are the landmarks of 
the countryside for miles around. When I 
came back to America I read the story of an 
American correspondent whom the Germans 
had brought down from Berlin to see the 
destruction of Verdun. They had brought 
him to the edge of the hills and then thrown 
some incendiary shells into the town, the 
very shells that killed the men whose bodies 
I had seen. The black smoke and flames 
rushed up around these towers and then the 
Germans brought the correspondent over the 
hills and showed him the destruction of 
Verdun. He described it vividly and con- 
cluded that the condition of the town must 
be desperate. 



58 THEY SHALL NOT PASS 

They are a wonderful people, these Ger- 
mans, in their stage management. Of course 
this was precisely the thing that they desired 
that he should feel. They had sent their 
shells at the right moment, the whole per- 
formance had gone off like clockwork. Those 
poor blackened masses of humanity in the 
house below were the cost that was repre- 
sented in the performance. And since there is 
much still left to burn in Verdun, the Germans 
may repeat this thing whenever they desire. 

But somewhere three or four miles from 
here, and between Verdun and the Germans, 
are many thousands of Frenchmen, with guns 
and cannon, and hearts of even finer metal. 
They cannot even know that Verdun is being 
shelled or is burning, and if it burns to ulti- 
mate ashes it will not affect them or their 
lines. This is the fallacy of all the talk of 
the destruction of Verdun city and the des- 
perate condition of its defenders. The army 
left Verdun for the hills when the war began; 
the people left when the present drive began 



THEY SHALL NOT PASS 59 

in February. Even the dogs and cats, which 
were seen by correspondents in earher visits, 
have been rescued and sent away. Verdun 
is dead, it is almost as dead as are Arras and 
Ypres; but neither of these towns after a 
year and a half bombardment has fallen. 

The correspondent who was taken up on 
a hill by the Germans to see Verdun burn, 
after it had been carefully set on fire by 
shell fire, was discovered by French gunners 
and shelled. He went away taking with him 
an impression of a doomed city. This pic- 
ture was duly transmitted to America. But 
two days later, when I visited the city, there 
was no evidence of desperation, because there 
was no one left to be desperate. Doubtless 
on occasion we shall have many more de- 
scriptions of the destruction of this town, 
descriptions meant to impress Americans or 
encourage Germans. The material for such 
fires is not exhausted. The cathedral on the 
top of the hill is hardly shell-marked at all, 
and it will make a famous display when it 



60 THEY SHALL NOT PASS 

is fired as was Rheims, as were the churches 
of Champagne and Artois. But there is 
something novel in the thought of a city- 
burned, not to make a Roman or even Ger- 
man hohday, but burned to make the world 
believe that the Battle of Verdun had been a 
German victory. 

For two hours we wandered about the town 
exploring and estimating the effect of heavy 
gunfire, for the Germans are too far from the 
city to use anything but heavy guns effec- 
tively. The impressions of such a visit are too 
numerous to recall. I shall mention but one 
more. Behind the cathedral are cloisters 
that the guide books mention; they inclose 
a courtyard that was once decorated with 
statues of saints. By some accident or 
miracle — there are always miracles in shelled 
towns — one of these images, perhaps that of 
the Madonna, has been lifted from its pedes- 
tal and thrown into the branches of a tree, 
which seems almost to hold it with out- 
stretched arms. 



\ 



THEY SHALL NOT PASS 61 

At length we left the town, going out by the 
Porte de France, which cuts the old Vauban 
ramparts, now as deserted as those of Paris, 
ramparts that had been covered with trees 
and were now strewn with the debris of the 
trees that had fallen under the shell fire. In 
all this time not a shell had fallen in Verdun; 
it was the first completely tranquil morning in 
weeks; but there was always the sense of im- 
pending destruction, there was always the 
sense of the approaching shell. There was 
an odd subconscious curiosity, and something 
more than curiosity, about the mental proc- 
esses of some men, not far away, who were 
beside guns pointed toward you, guns which 
yesterday or the day before had sent their 
destruction to the very spot where you stood. 

Yet, oddly enough, in the town there was 
a wholly absurd sense of security, derived 
from the fact that there were still buildings 
between you and those guns. You saw that 
the buildings went to dust and ashes when- 
ever the guns were fired; you saw that each 



62 THEY SHALL NOT PASS 

explosion might turn a city block into ashes, 
and yet you were glad of the buildings and 
there was reassurance in their shadows. 
Now we travelled in the open country; we be- 
gan to climb across the face of a bare hill, and 
it was the face that fronted the Germans. 

Presently the General's car stuck in the mud 
and we halted, for a minute perhaps; then we 
went on; we passed a dead horse lying in the 
road, then of a sudden came that same terrible 
grinding, metallic crash. I have never seen 
any description of a heavy shell explosion that 
fitted it. Behind us we could see the black 
smoke rising from the ground in a suburb 
through which we had just come. I saw 
three explosions. A moment later we were at 
the gate of Fort de la Chaume, and we were 
warned not to stop, but to hasten in, for the 
Germans, whenever they see cars at this 
point, suspect that Joffre has arrived, or 
President Poincare, and act accordingly. We 
did not delay. 

Fort de la Chaume is one of the many f orti- 



THEY SHALL NOT PASS 63 

fications built since the Franco-Prussian War 
and intended to defend the city. Like all the 
rest, it ceased to have value when the German 
artillery had shown at Liege and at Namur 
that it was the master of the fort. Then the 
French left their forts and went out to 
trenches beyond and took with them the 
heavy guns that the fort once boasted. 
To-day Fort de la Chaume is just an empty 
shell, as empty as the old Vauban citadel in 
the valley below. And what is true of this 
fort is true of all the other forts of that famous 
fortress of Verdun, which is no longer a for- 
tress, but a sector in the trench line that runs 
from the North Sea to Switzerland. 

From the walls of the fort staff officers 
showed me the surrounding country. I 
looked down on the city of Verdun, hiding 
under the shadow of its cathedral. I looked 
across the level Meuse Valley, with its little 
river; I studied the wall of hills beyond. 
Somewhere in the tangle on the horizon was 
Douaumont, which the Germans held. Down 



64 THEY SHALL NOT PASS 

the valley of the river in the haze was the town 
of Bras, which was French; beyond it the 
village of Vachereauville, which was German. 
Beyond the hills in the centre of the picture, 
but hidden by them, were Le Mort Homme 
and Hill 304. 

Verdun is like a lump of sugar in a finger 
bowl, and I was standing on the rim. It 
seemed utterly impossible that any one should 
even think of this town as a fortress or count 
its ashes as of meaning in the conflict. 

Somewhere in the background a French 
battery of heavy guns was firing, and the 
sound was clear; but it did not suggest war, 
rather a blasting operation. The German 
guns were still again. There was a faint 
billowing roll of gunfire across the river to- 
ward Douaumont, but very faint. As for 
trenches, soldiers, evidences of battle, they 
did not exist. I thought of Ralph Pulitzer's 
vivid story of riding to the Rheims front in a 
military aeroplane and seeing, of war, just 
nothing. 



THEY SHALL NOT PASS 65 

The geography of the Verdun country un- 
rolled before us with absolute clarity; the 
whole relation of hills and river and railroads 
was unmistakable. But despite the faint 
sound of musketry, the occasional roar of a 
French gun, I might have been in the Berk- 
shires looking down on the Housatonic. Six 
miles to the north around Le Mort Homme 
that battle which has not stopped for two 
months was still going on. Around Douau- 
mont the overture was just starting, the over- 
ture to a stiff fight in the afternoon, but of all 
the circumstances of battle that one has read 
of, that one still vaguely expects to see, there 
was not a sign. If it suited their fancy the 
Germans could turn the hill on which I stood 
into a crater of ruin, as they did with Fort 
Loncin at Liege. We were well within range, 
easy range; we lived because they had no 
object to serve by such shooting, but we were 
without even a hint of their whereabouts. 

I have already described the military geog- 
raphy of Verdun. I shall not attempt to re- 



66 THEY SHALL NOT PASS 

peat it here, but it is the invisibihty of war- 
fare, whether examined from the earth or the 
air, which impresses the civihan. If you go 
to the trenches you creep through tunnels and 
cavities until you are permitted to peer 
through a peephole, and you see yellow dirt 
some yards away. You may hear bullets 
over your head, you may hear shells passing, 
but what you see is a hillside with some slash- 
ings. That is the enemy. If you go to an 
observation post back of the trenches, then 
you will see a whole range of country, but not 
even the trenches of your own side. 

From the Grand Mont east of Nancy I 
watched some French batteries shell the Ger- 
man line. I didn't see the French guns, I 
didn't see the German trenches, I didn't see 
the French line. I did see some black smoke 
rising a little above the underbrush, and I 
was told that the shells were striking behind 
the German lines and that the gunners were 
searching for a German battery. But I 
might as well have been observing a gang of 



THEY SHALL NOT PASS 67 

Italians at blasting operations in the Mont- 
clair Mountains. And the oflScer with me 
said: "Our children are just amusing them- 
selves." 

From Fort de la Chaume we rode back to 
the citadel; and there I was the guest of the 
General and the officers of the town garrison ; 
their guest because I was an American who 
came to see their town. I shall always re- 
member that luncheon down in the very 
depths of this rock in a dimly lighted room. 
I sat at the General's right, and all around me 
were the men whose day's work it was to keep 
the roads open, the machinery running in the 
shell-cursed city. Every time they went out 
into daylight they knew that they might not 
return. For two months the storm had 
beaten about this rock, it had written its 
mark upon all these faces, and yet it hadi 
neither extinguished the light nor the laugh- 
ter; the sense of strength and of calmness was' 
inescapable, and never have I known such 
charming, such thoughtful hosts. 



68 THEY SHALL NOT PASS 

When the champagne came the old General 
rose and made me a little speech. He spoke 
in English, with absolute correctness, but as 
one who spoke it with difficulty. He wel- 
comed me as an American to Verdun, he 
thanked me for coming, he raised his glass to 
drink to my country and the hope that in the 
right time she would be standing with France 
— in the cause of civilization. Always in his 
heart, in his thought, in his speech, the French- 
man is thinking of that cause of civiliza- 
tion; always this is what the terrible con- 
flict that is eating up all France means to him. 

Afterward we went out of this cavern into 
daylight, and the officers came and shook 
hands with me and said good-bye. One does 
not say au revoir at the front; one says 
bonne chance — "good luck; it may and it 
may not — we hope not." We entered our 
cars and were about to start, when suddenly, 
with a blinding, stunning crash, a whole 
salvo landed in the meadow just beyond 
the road, we could not see where, because 



THEY SHALL NOT PASS 69 

some houses hid the field. It was the most 
suddenly appalling crash I have ever heard. 

Instantly the General ordered our drivers to 
halt. He explained that it might be the be- 
ginning of a bombardment or only a single 
trial, a detail in the intermittent firing to cut 
the road that we were to take. We sat wait- 
ing for several moments and no more shots 
came. Then the General turned and gave an 
order to his car to follow, bade our drivers go 
fast, and climbed into my car and sat down. 
The wandering American correspondent was 
his guest. He could not protect him from the 
shell fire. He could not prevent it. But he 
could share the danger. He could share the 
risk, and so he rode with me the mile until we 
passed beyond the danger zone. There he 
gave me another bonne chance and left me, 
went back to his shell-cursed town with its 
ruins and its agonies. 

I hope I shall see General Dubois again. I 
hope it will be on the day when he is made 
Governor of Strassburg. 



70 THEY SHALL NOT PASS 

As we left Verdun the firing was increasing; 
it was rolling up like a rising gale; the infantry 
fire was becoming pronounced; the Germans 
were beginning an attack upon Le Mort 
Homme. Just before sunset we passed 
through the Argonne Forest and came out 
beyond. On a hill to the north against the 
sky the monument of Valmy stood out in 
clear relief, marking the hill where Kellerman 
had turned back another Prussian army. 
Then we slipped down into the Plain of 
Chalons, where other Frenchmen had met and 
conquered Attila. At dark we halted in 
Montmirail, where Napoleon won his last 
victory before his empire fell. The sound of 
the guns we had left behind was still in our 
ears and the meaning of these names in our 
minds. Presently my French companion 
said to me: "It is a long time, isn't it.^" He 
meant all the years since the first storm came 
out of the north, and I think the same thought 
is in every Frenchman's mind. Then he told 
me his story. 



THEY SHALL NOT PASS 71 

"I had two boys," he said; "one was taken 
from me years ago in an accident; he was 
killed and it was terrible. But the other I 
gave. 

"He was shot, my last boy, up near Verdun, 
in the beginning of the war. He did not die 
at once and I went to him. For twenty days 
I sat beside him in a cellar waiting for him to 
die. I bought the last coffin in the village, 
that he might be buried in it, and kept it 
under my bed. We talked many times be- 
fore he died, and he told me all he knew of the 
fight, of the men about him and how they fell. 

"My name is finished, but I say to you 
now that in all that experience there was 
nothing that was not beautiful." And as far 
as I can analyze or put in words the impres- 
sion that I have brought away from France, 
from the ruin and the suffering and the de- 
struction, I think it is expressed in those 
words. I have seen nothing that was not 
beautiful, too, because through all the spirit 
of France shone clear and bright. 



Ill 

BATTLE OF VERDUN ANOTHER 
GETTYSBURG 

FAILURE OF CROWN PRINCE LIKENED BY 
FRENCH TO "HIGH TIDE" OF CONFEDERACY 

THE parallel between Gettysburg in 
your Civil War and Verdun in the 
present contest is unmistakable and 
striking." This was said to me by Gen- 
eral D^acroix, one of Joffre's predecessors 
as chief of the French General Staff and the 
distinguished military critic of the Paris Temps 
now that because of age he has passed to the 
retired list. 

What General Delacroix meant was patent 
and must have already impressed many 
Americans. Our own Gettysburg was the 
final bid for decision of a South which had 
long been victorious on the battlefield, which 

72 



THEY SHALL NOT PASS 73 

still possessed the armies that seemed the 
better organized and the generals whose cam- 
paigns had been wonderfully successful. But 
it was the bid for decision of a Confederacy 
which was outnumbered in men, in resources, 
in the ultimate powers of endurance, and was 
already beginning to feel the growing pinch 
both in numbers and credit. 

At Gettysburg Lee made his final effort to 
destroy the army which he had frequently de- 
feated but never eliminated. Victory meant 
the fall of Washington, the coming of despair 
to the North, an end of the Civil War, which 
would bring independence and the prize for 
which they had contended to the Confeder- 
ates. And Lee failed at Gettysburg, not as 
Napoleon failed at Waterloo or as MacMahon 
failed at Sedan, but he failed, and his failure 
was the beginning of the end. The victory of 
Gettysburg put new heart, new assurance 
into the North; it broke the long illusion of an 
invincible Confederacy; it gave to Europe, to 
London, and to Paris, even more promptly 



74 THEY SHALL NOT PASS 

than to Washington, the unmistakable mes- 
sage that the North was bound to win the 
Civil War. 

I mean in a moment to discuss the military 
aspects of this conflict about the Lorraine 
fortress, but before the military it is essential 
to grasp the moral consequences of Verdun 
to France, to the Allies, to Germany. Not 
since the Marne, not even then — because it 
was only after a long delay that France really 
knew what had happened in this struggle — 
has anything occurred that has so profoundly, 
so indescribably, heartened the French people 
as has the victory at Verdun. It is not too 
much to say that the victory has been the 
most immediately inspiring thing in French 
national life since the disaster at Sedan and 
that it has roused national confidence, hope, 
faith, as nothing else has since the present 
conflict began. 

In this sense rather than in the military 
sense Verdun was a decisive battle and its con- 
sequences of far-reaching character. France 



THEY SHALL NOT PASS 75 

as a whole, from the moment when the attack 
began, understood the issue; the battle was 
fought in the open and the whole nation 
watched the communiques day by day. It 
was accepted as a terrible if not a final test, 
and no Frenchman fails to recognize in all 
that he says the strength, the power, the mili- 
tary skill of Germany. 

And when the advance was checked, when 
after the first two weeks the battle flickered 
out as did the French offensive in Cham- 
pagne and the former German drive about 
Ypres a year ago, France, which had held her 
breath and waited, hoped, read in the results 
at Verdun the promise of ultimate victory, 
felt that all that Germany had, all that she 
could produce, had been put to the test and 
had failed to accomplish the result for which 
Germany had striven — or any portion thereof. 

War is something beyond armies and 
tactics, beyond strategy and even military 
genius, and the real meaning of Verdun is not 
to be found in lines held or lost, not to be found 



76 THEY SHALL NOT PASS 

even in the ashes of the old town that France 
and not Germany holds. It is to be found in 
the spirit of France, now that the great trial is 
over and the lines have held. 

It was Germany and not France that 
raised the issue of Verdun. The Germans 
believed, and all their published statements 
show this, that France was weary, disheart- 
ened, ready to quit, on fair terms. They be- 
lieved that there was needed only a shining 
victory, a great moral demonstration of 
German strength to accomplish the end — to 
bring victorious peace. In this I think, and 
all with whom I talked in France felt, that the 
Germans were wrong, that France would have 
endured defeat and gone on. But conversely, 
the Germans knew, must have known, that to 
try and to fail was to rouse the whole heart of 
France, to destroy any pessimism, and this is 
precisely what the failure has done. 

The battle for Verdun was a battle for 
moral rather than military values, and the 
moral victory remains with the French. It 



THEY SHALL NOT PASS 77 

was a deliberate and calculated effort to 
break the spirit of France, and it roused the 
spirit of France as perhaps nothing has raised 
the spirit of this people since Valmy, where 
other Frenchmen met and checked another 
German invasion, brought to a halt the army 
of Frederick the Great, which still preserved 
the prestige of its great captain who was dead, 
turned it back along the road that was pres- 
ently to end at Jena. 

Beside the moral value of Verdun the mili- 
tary is just nothing. To appreciate its mean- 
ing you must understand what it has meant 
to the French, and you must understand it 
by recalling what Gettysburg meant to the 
North, invaded as is France, defeated at half 
a dozen struggles in Virginia as France has 
been defeated in the past months of this war. 
Gettysburg was and remains the decisive 
battle of our Civil War, although the con- 
flict lasted for nearly two years more. For 
France Verdun is exactly the same thing. 
Having accepted the moral likeness, you may 



78 THEY SHALL NOT PASS 

find much that is instructive and suggestive in 
the mihtary, but this is of relatively minor 
importance. 

Now, on the military side it is necessary to 
know first of all that when the Germans be- 
gan their gigantic attack upon Verdun the 
French high command decided not to defend 
the city. Joffre and those who with him di- 
rect the French armies were agreed that the 
city of Verdun was without military value 
comparable with the cost of defending it, and 
that the wisest and best thing to do was to 
draw back the lines to the hills above the city 
and west of the Meuse. Had their will pre- 
vailed there would have been no real battle at 
Verdun and the Germans would long ago have 
occupied the ashes of the town. 

Joffre's view was easily explicable, and it 
was hardly possible to quarrel with the mili- 
tary judgment it discloses. To the world 
Verdun is a great fortress, a second Gibraltar, 
encircled by great forts, furnished with huge 
guns, the gateway to Paris and the key to the 



THEY SHALL NOT PASS 79 

French eastern frontier. And this is just 
what Verdun was until the coming of the 
present war, when the German and Austrian 
siege guns levelled the forts of Antwerp, of 
Maubeuge, of Liege. But after that Verdun 
ceased to be anything, because all fortresses 
lost their value with the revelation that they 
had failed to keep pace with the gun. 

After the Battle of the Marne, when the 
trench war began, the French took all their 
guns out of the forts of Verdun, pushed out 
before the forts, and Verdun became just a 
sector in the long trench line from the sea to 
Switzerland. It was defended by trenches, 
not forts. It was neither of more importance 
nor less than any other point in the line and it 
was a place of trenches, not of forts. The 
forts were empty and remain empty, monu- 
ments to the past of war, quite as useless as 
the walls of Rome would be against modern 
artillery. 

The decline of Verdun was even more com- 
plete. From the strongest point in French 



80 THEY SHALL NOT PASS 

defence it became the weakest. When the 
Germans took St. Mihiel in September, 1914, 
they cut the north and south railroad that 
binds Verdun to the Paris-Nancy Railroad. 
When they retreated from the Marne they 
halted at Varennes and Montfaucon, and 
from these points they command the Paris- 
Verdun-Metz Railroad. Apart from a single 
narrow-gauge railroad of minor value, which 
wanders among the hills, climbing at pro- 
hibitive grades, Verdun is isolated from the 
rest of France. Consider what this means in 
modern war when the amount of ammunition 
consumed in a day almost staggers belief. 
Consider what it means when there are a 
quarter of a million men to be fed and mu- 
nitioned in this sector. 

More than all this, when the lines came 
down to the trench condition Verdun was a 
salient, it was a narrow curve bulging out into 
the German front. It was precisely the same 
sort of military position as Ypres, which the 
Germans have twice before selected as the 



THEY SHALL NOT PASS 81 

point for a great attack. In the Verdun 
sector the French are exposed to a converging 
fire; they are inside the German semicircle. 
Moreover, the salient is so narrow that the 
effect of converging fire is not to be exagger- 
ated. 

When the French attacked the Germans in 
Champagne last fall they advanced on a wide 
front from a line parallel to the German line. 
As they pierced the first German lines they 
were exposed to the converging fire of the 
Germans, because they were pushing a wedge 
in. Ultimately they got one brigade through 
all the German lines, but it was destroyed be- 
yond by this converging fire. But as the 
Germans advanced upon Verdun they were 
breaking down a salient and possessed the 
advantage they had had on the defensive in 
Champagne. 

Finally, one-half the French army of Ver- 
dun fought with its back to a deep river, con- 
nected with the other half only by bridges, 
some of which presently came under German 



82 THEY SHALL NOT PASS 

fire, and there was every possibility that these 
troops might be cut off and captured if the 
German advance were pushed home far 
enough on the west bank of the Meuse and 
the Germ'an artillery was successful in inter- 
rupting the passage of the river. It was a 
perilous position and there were some days 
when the situation seemed critical. 

Accordingly, when the German drive at 
Verdun was at last disclosed in its real magni- 
tude Joffre prepared to evacuate the town and 
the east bank of the river, to straighten his 
line and abolish the salient and give over to 
the Germans the wreck of Verdun. The 
position behind the river was next to im- 
pregnable; the lines would then be parallel; 
there would be no salient, and in the new 
position the French could concentrate their 
heavy artillery while the Germans were mov- 
ing up the guns that they had fixed to the 
north of the old front. 

But at this point the French politician in- 
terfered. He recognized the wisdom of the 



THEY SHALL NOT PASS 83 

merely military view of Joffre, but he saw also 
the moral value. He recognized that the 
French and the German public alike would 
not see Verdun as a mere point in a trench 
line and a point almost impossible to defend 
and destitute of military value. He saw that 
the French and German publics would think 
of Verdun as it had been thought of before the 
present war changed all the conditions of con- 
flict. He recognized that the German people 
would be roused to new hope and confidence 
by the capture of a great fortress, and that the 
French would be equally depressed by losing 
what they believed was a great fortress. 

You had therefore in France for some hours, 
perhaps for several days, something that 
approximated a crisis growing out of the 
division of opinion between the civil and the 
military authorities, a division of opinion 
based upon two wholly different but not im- 
possible equally correct appraisals. Joffre 
did not believe it was worth the men or the 
risk to hold a few square miles of French 



84 THEY SHALL NOT PASS 

territory, since to evacuate would strengthen, 
not weaken, the Hne. The French poKticians 
recognized that to lose Verdun was to suffer a 
moral defeat which would almost infallibly 
bring down the Ministry, might call into ex- 
istence a new Committee of Public Safety, and 
would fire the German heart and depress the 
French. 

In the end the politicians had their way and 
Castelnau, Joffre's second in command, came 
over to their view and set out for Verdun to 
organize the defence for the position at the 
eleventh hour. He had with him Petain, the 
man who had commanded the French army 
in the Battle of Champagne and henceforth 
commanded the army that was hurried to the 
Verdun sector. France now took up definitely 
the gage of battle as Germany had laid it 
down. Verdun now became a battle in the 
decisive sense of the word, although still on 
the moral side. Nothing is more prepos- 
terous than to believe that there ever was any 
chance of a German advance through Verdun 



THEY SHALL NOT PASS 85 

to Paris. One has only to go to Verdun and 
see the country and the lines behind the city 
and miles back of the present front to realize 
how foolish such talk is. 

Meantime the German advance had been 
steady and considerable. All these attacks 
follow the same course — Ypres, Artois, Cham- 
pagne, Dunajec. There is first the tremendous 
artillery concentration of the assailant; then 
the bombardment which abolishes the first 
and second line trenches of the defenders; 
then the infantry attack which takes these 
ruined trenches and almost invariably many 
thousands of prisoners and scores of guns. 
But now the situation changes. The assail- 
ant has passed beyond the effective range of 
his own heavy artillery, which cannot be im- 
mediately advanced because of its weight; he 
encounters a line of trenches that has not been 
levelled, he has come under the concentrated 
fire of his foe's heavy and light artillery with- 
out the support of his own heavy artillery, 
and all the advantage of surprise has gone. 



86 THEY SHALL NOT PASS 

What happened at Verdun is what hap- 
pened in the Champagne. The German ad- 
vance was quite as successful — rather more 
successful than the French last September; it 
covered three or four miles on a considerable 
front, and it even reached Douaumont, one of 
the old forts and the fort which was placed 
on the highest hill in the environs of Verdun. 
Thousands of prisoners had been captured and 
many guns taken. But at this point the 
French resistance stiffened, as had the Ger- 
man last year. French reserves and artil- 
lery arrived. Petain and Castelnau arrived. 
There was an end of the rapid advance and 
there began the pounding, grinding attack in' 
which the advantage passed to the defender. 
It was just what happened at Neuve Chapelle 
so long ago when we first saw this kind of 
fighting exemplified completely. 

In the new attacks the Germans still gained 
ground, but they gained ground because the 
French withdrew from positions made un- 
tenable through the original German advance 



THEY SHALL NOT PASS 87 

at other points. They consolidated their line, 
organized their new front. Ten days after 
the attack had begun it had ceased to be a 
question of Verdun, just as in a shorter time 
the French had realized last September that 
they could not break the German line in 
Champagne. But like the French in Cham- 
pagne, like the British at Neuve Chapelle, the 
Germans persevered, and in consequence 
suffered colossal losses, exactly as the French 
and British had. 

To understand the German tactics you 
must recognize two things. The Germans 
had expected to take Verdun, and they had 
unquestionably known that the French mili- 
tary command did not intend at the outset to 
hold the town. They had advertised the com- 
ing victory far and wide over the world; they 
had staked much upon it. Moreover, in the 
first days, when they had taken much ground, 
when they had got Douaumont and could 
look down into Verdun, they had every 
reason to believe that they possessed the key 



88 THEY SHALL NOT PASS 

to the city and that the French high command 
was slowly but steadily drawing back its lines 
and would presently evacuate the city. 

Knowing these things you can understand 
why the Germans were so confident. They 
did not invent stories of coming victory which 
they did not believe. They believed that 
Verdun was to fall because they knew, and 
the same thing was known and mentioned in 
London. I heard it there when the battle 
was in its earlier stages — that the French high 
command intended to evacuate Verdun. 
What they did not know and could not know 
was that the French politicians, perhaps one 
should say statesmen this time, had inter- 
fered, that the French high command had 
yielded and that Verdun was to be defended 
to the last ditch. 

When this decision was made the end of the 
real German advance was almost instan- 
taneous. All that has happened since has 
been nothing but active trench war, violent 
fighting, desperate charge and counter charge. 



THEY SHALL NOT PASS 89 

a material shortening of the French line at 
certain points, the abolition of minor salients, 
but of actual progress not the smallest. The 
advance stopped before lines on which Petain 
elected to make his stand when he came with 
his army to defend Verdun. The Germans 
are still several miles outside of Verdun itself, 
and only at Douaumont have they touched 
the line of the exterior forts, which before the 
war were expected to defend the city. 

In Paris and elsewhere you will be told that 
Douaumont was occupied without resistance 
and that it was abandoned under orders be- 
fore there had been a decision to hold Verdun. 
I do not pretend to know whether this is true 
or not, although I heard it on authority that 
was wholly credible, but the fact that the map 
discloses, that I saw for myself at Verdun, is 
that, save for Douaumont, none of the old 
forts have been taken and that the Germans 
have never been able to advance a foot from 
Douaumont or reach the other forts at any 
other point. And this is nothing more or 



90 THEY SHALL NOT PASS 

less than the French experience at Champagne, 
the German experience about Ypres in 1915. 

In a later chapter I hope to discuss the sit- 
uation at Verdun as I saw it on April 6th, and 
also the miracle of motor transport which 
played so great a part in the successful de- 
fence of the position. But the military de- 
tails are wholly subordinate to the moral. All 
France was roused by a successful defence of a 
position attacked by Germany with the adver- 
tised purpose of breaking the spirit of the 
French people. The battle was fought in the 
plain daylight without the smallest conceal- 
ment, and the least-informed reader of the 
oflScial reports could grasp the issue which was 
the fate of the city of Verdun. 

The fact, known to a certain number of 
Frenchmen only, that the defence was im- 
provised after the decision had been made to 
evacuate the whole salient, serves for them to 
increase the meaning of the victory as it in- 
creases the real extent of the French exploit. 
But this is a detail. The Germans openly, 



THEY SHALL NOT PASS 91 

deliberately, after long preparation, an- 
nounced their purpose, used every conceiv- 
able bit of strength they could bring to bear to 
take Verdun, and told their own people not 
merely that Verdun would fall, but at one 
moment that it had fallen. They did this 
with the firm conviction that it would fall — 
was falling. 

The French were steadily aware that Ver- 
dun might be lost. They knew from letters 
coming daily from the front how terrible the 
struggle was, and it is impossible to exagger- 
ate the tension of the early days, although it 
was not a tension of panic or fear. Paris did 
not expect to see the invader, and there was 
nothing of this sort of moonshine abroad. 
But it was plain that the fall of the town 
would bring a tremendous wave of depression 
and if not despair yet a real reduction of hope. 
Instead, Verdun defended itself, the lines 
were maintained several miles on the other 
side of the town and all substantial advance 
came to an end in the first two weeks. The 



92 THEY SHALL NOT PASS 

army itself, the military observers, were con- 
vinced that all danger was over as early as the 
second week in March, when correspondents 
of French newspapers were being taken to 
Verdun to see the situation and tell the people 
the facts. 

All over Northern France, and I was in 
many towns and cities, the "lift" that Ver- 
dun had brought was unmistakable and 
French confidence was everywhere evident. 
It showed itself in a spontaneous welcome to 
Alexander of Serbia in Paris, which, I am told, 
\yas the first thing of the sort in the war 
period. Frenchmen did not say that Verdun 
was the beginning of the end, and they did not 
forecast the prompt collapse of Germany. 
They did not even forecast the immediate end 
of the fighting about Verdun. They did not 
regard the victory as a Waterloo or a Sedan 
or any other foolish thing. But they did 
rather coolly and quite calmly appraise the 
thing and see in it the biggest German failure 
since the Marne, and a failure in a fight which 



THEY SHALL NOT PASS 93 

the Germans had laid down all the conditions 
in advance and advertised the victory that 
they did not achieve as promising the collapse 
of French endurance and spirit. 

The Battle of Verdun was a battle for 
moral values, and the possession of the town 
itself was never of any real military value. 
Verdun commands nothing, and behind it lie 
well-prepared fortifications on dominating 
heights, positions that are ten times as easy to 
defend as those which the French have de- 
fended. It was not a battle for Paris, and 
there was never a prospect of the piercing of 
the French line; Germany was never as near a 
great military success as she was at Ypres 
after the first gas attack a year ago. The 
French army leaders judged the Verdun 
position as not worth the cost of defending. 
They were overruled by the politicians and 
they defended it successfully. But their first 
decision is the best evidence of the wholly 
illusory value that has been attached to the 
possession of Verdun itself. 



94 THEY SHALL NOT PASS 

The politicians were unquestionably right 
as to the moral value, and it is possible if not 
probable that the relinquishment of the city 
voluntarily might have precipitated the fall of 
the Briand Ministry and the creation of a 
Committee of Public Safety — not to make 
peace, but to make war successfully. The 
will to defend Verdun came from the French 
people, it imposed itself upon the army and it 
resulted in a moral victory the consequences 
of which cannot be exaggerated and have 
given new heart and confidence to a people 
whose courage and determination must make 
an enduring impression on any one who sees 
France in the present terrible but glorious 
time. 



IV 

VERDUN, THE DOOR THAT LEADS 
NOWHERE 

THE BATTLE AND THE TOPOGRAPHY OF THE 

BATTLEFIELD — AN ANALYSIS OF THE 

ATTACK AND DEFENCE 

IN A preceding article I have endeavored 
to explain the tremendous moral "lift" 
that the successful defence of the city of 
Verdun has brought to France, a moral 
"lift" which has roused French confidence 
and expectation of ultimate victory to the 
highest point since the war began. I have 
also tried to demonstrate how utterly without 
value the fortress of Verdun was, because 
the forts were of no use in the present war, 
were as useless against German heavy artil- 
lery as those of Antwerp and Maubeuge, and 
had been evacuated by the French a full 

95 



96 THEY SHALL NOT PASS 

eighteen months before the present battle 
began. Finally I have indicated that so 
little military value was attached to Verdun 
by the French high command that it was 
prepared to evacuate the whole position, 
which is the most difficult to defend on the 
whole French front, and was only persuaded 
to give over his purpose by the arguments 
of the politicians, who believed that the moral 
effect of the evacuation would be disastrous 
to France and inspiriting to Germany. 

I now desire to describe at some length the 
actual topographical circumstances of Ver- 
dun and later I shall discuss the fashion in 
which an automobile transport system w^as 
improvised to meet the situation created 
by the interruption of traffic by German 
artillery fire along the two considerable rail- 
road lines. It was this system which actually 
saved the town and is the real "miracle of 
Verdun," if one is to have miracles to explain 
what brave and skilful men do. 

I saw Verdun on April 6th. I went through 



THEY SHALL NOT PASS 97 

the city, which was little more than a mass of 
ashes, with General Dubois, the military 
governor of the town itself, and with him I 
went to Fort de la Chaume, on one of the 
highest hills near Verdun, and from this van- 
tage point had the whole countryside ex- 
plained to me. The day on which I visited 
Verdun was the first completely quiet day in 
weeks, and I was thus fortunate in being able 
to see and to go about without the disturbing 
or hindering circumstances which are incident 
to a bombardment. 

The city of Verdun is situated at the bot- 
tom of the Meuse Valley on both sides of the 
river. But the main portion of the town is 
on the west bank and surrounds a low hill, 
crowned by the cathedral and old Vauban 
citadel. The town is surrounded by old 
ramparts, long ago deprived of military value 
and belonging, like the citadel, to eighteenth 
century warfare. The Valley of the Meuse 
is here several miles wide, as flat as your hand, 
and the river, which is small but fairly deep. 



98 THEY SHALL NOT PASS 

a real obstacle since it cannot be forded, 
wanders back and forth from one side of the 
valley to the other. Below Verdun it is 
doubled, as a military obstacle, by the Canal 
de TEst. 

If you put a lump of sugar in a finger bowl 
you will pretty fairly reproduce the Verdun 
topography. The lump of sugar will repre- 
sent Verdun, the rim of the bowl the hills 
around the city, the interior of the bowl the 
little basin in which the city stands. This 
rim of hills, which rise some five or six hun- 
dred feet above the town itself, is broken on 
the west by a deep and fairly narrow trough 
which comes into the Meuse Valley and con- 
nects it some thirty miles to the west with the 
Plain of Chalons. If you should look down 
upon this region from an aeroplane this fur- 
row would look like a very deep gutter cut- 
ting far into the tangle of hills. 

Now in the warfare of other centuries 
the value of the Verdun fortress was just this: 
the furrow which I have described is the 



THEY SHALL NOT PASS 99 

one avenue available for an invading army 
coming from the east out of Metz or south 
from Luxemburg and aiming to get into the 
Plain of Chalons to the west. It is the way 
the Prussians came in 1792 and were de- 
feated at Valmy, at the western entrance of 
the trough about thirty miles away. They 
took Verdun on their way — so did the Ger- 
mans in 1870. 

Verdun in French hands closed this trough 
to the invaders. 

It closed it because the low hill which bears 
the town was strongly fortified and was sur- 
rounded by lower ground. Such artillery 
as was in existence was not of a sufficiently 
long range to place upon the hills about Ver- 
dun which we have described as the rim of 
the bowl. The town of Verdun was situated 
on both sides of the river and commanded all 
the bridges. It was, in fact, the stopple in 
the mouth of the bottle-neck passage leading 
into North Central France, the passage 
through which ran the main road and, later, 



100 THEY SHALL NOT PASS 

the railway from the frontier nearest Paris 
to the capital. 

But when the modern developments of 
artillery came, then Verdun, the old fortress 
that Vauban built for Louis XIV, lost its 
value. It was commanded by the surround- 
ing hills and the French moved out of the 
town and the Vauban fortifications and built 
on the surrounding hills, on the rim, to go 
back to our figure, the forts which were the 
defence of the town when the present war 
began, forts arranged quite like those of 
Liege or Antwerp and some four or five miles 
away from the town. But bear in mind 
these forts were designed, like the old fortress 
and fortifications of the eighteenth century, 
to bar the road from the Meuse and from 
Germany to the Plain of Chalons and the 
level country west of the Argonne. When 
the Germans came south through Belgium 
and got into the Plain of Chalons from the 
north they had turned the whole Verdun 
position and had got into the region it barred 



THEY SHALL NOT PASS 101 

by another route; they had come in by the 
back door; Verdun was the front. Not only 
that, but they are there now and have been 
there ever since the first days of September, 
1914. 

When one hears about Verdun as the gate- 
way to Paris or anything else one hears 
about the Verdun of the past. It was not the 
door to Paris but the outer door to the region 
around Paris, to the Plains of Champagne 
and Chalons. But as the Germans are al- 
ready in these plains the taking of Verdun 
now would not bring them nearer to Paris; 
they are only fifty miles away at Noyon, on 
the Oise, and they would be 160 at Verdun 
if they took the city. If they took Verdun 
they would get control of the Paris-Metz Rail- 
way, and if they then drove the French away 
from the trough we have been describing 
they would get a short line into France, and a 
line coming from German territory directly, 
not passing through Belgium. But they 
would not be nearer to Paris. 



102 THEY SHALL NOT PASS 

When the French saw, m the opening days 
of the war, that forts were of no permanent 
value against the German guns they left the 
forts on the hills above Verdun as they had 
abandoned the Vauban works and moved 
north for a few miles. Here they dug 
trenches, mounted their guns in concealed 
positions, and stood on the defensive, as they 
were standing elsewhere from Belgium to 
Switzerland. There was now no fortress of 
Verdun, and Verdun city was nothing but a 
point behind the lines of trenches, a point like 
Rheims, or Arras. The forts of the rim were 
equally of no more importance and were 
now empty of guns or garrisons. If the 
Germans, by a sudden attack, broke all 
the way through the French trenches here 
it would be quite as serious as if they broke 
through at other points, but no more so. 
There was no fortress of Verdun and the 
Verdun position commanded nothing. 

The Battle of Verdun, as it is disclosed to 
an observer who stands on Fort de la Chaume, 



THEY SHALL NOT PASS 103 

a mile or two west and above Verdun and in 
the mouth of the trough we have described, 
was this: On the west bank of the Meuse, 
four or five miles northwest of the town, there 
is a steep ridge going east and west and per- 
haps 1,100 feet high. This is the crest of 
Charny, and it rises sharply from the flat 
valley and marches to the west without a 
break for some miles. On it are the old forts 
of the rim. 

Three or four miles still to the north is a 
line of hills which are separated from each 
other by deep ravines leading north and 
south. Two of these hills, Le Mort Homme 
(Dead Man's Hill) and Hill 304, have been 
steadily in the reports for many weeks. They 
are the present front of the French. Between 
one and two miles still to the north are other 
confused and tangled hills facing north, and 
it was here that the French lines ran when the 
great attack began in the third week of Feb- 
ruary. On this side the Germans have ad- 
vanced rather less than two miles; they have 



104 THEY SHALL NOT PASS 

not reached the Charny Ridge, which is the 
true and last line of defence of the Verdun 
position, and they have not captured the two 
hills to the north, which are the advanced 
position, now the first line. 

When I was in Paris before I went to Ver- 
dun there was a general belief that the French 
might ultimately abandon the two outer 
hills. Dead Man's and 304, and come back 
to the Charny Ridge, which is a wall running 
from the river west without a break for miles. 
Apparently this has not been found necessary, 
but what is worth noting is that if these hills 
were evacuated it would not mean the with- 
drawal from Verdun but only to the best line 
of defence (the last line, to be sure), which 
includes the town itself. 

Now, east of the river the situation is 
materially different. Between the Meuse 
and the level plateau, which appears in the 
dispatches from the front as the Woevre, is a 
long, narrow ridge, running from north to 
south for perhaps thirty-five or forty miles. 



THEY SHALL NOT PASS 105 

This is the Cote de Meuse, or, translated, 
the Hills of the Meuse. The range is never 
more than ten miles wide and at many points 
less than half as wide. On the west it rises 
very sharply from the Meuse and on the east 
it breaks down quite as abruptly into the 
Woevre Plain. It cannot be effectively 
approached from the Woevre, because the 
Woevre is an exceedingly marshy plain, with 
much sub-surface water and in spring a mass 
of liquid clay. 

Now the French, when the German drive 
began, stood on this ridge some eight miles, 
rather less, perhaps, to the north of the town 
of Verdun; their line ran from the Meuse 
straight east along this ridge and then turned 
at right angles and came south along the 
eastern edge of the Meuse Hills and the shore 
of the Woevre Plain until it touched the river 
again at St. Mihiel, twenty miles to the 
south, where the Germans had broken through 
the Meuse Hills and reached the river. The 
German attack came south along the crest 



106 THEY SHALL NOT PASS 

of this ridge because the German heavy 
artillery could not be brought over the 
Woevre. 

About halfway between the French front 
and Verdun, on a little crest somewhat higher 
than the main ridge, the French had erected 
a line of forts, just as they had on the Charny 
Ridge, Forts Douaumont and Vaux, familiar 
names now, were the forts most distant from 
Verdun. But the French here, as on the 
other side of the river, had come out of these 
forts, abandoned and dismantled them, and 
taken to trenches much to the north. It was 
upon these trenches that the main German 
attack fell, and in the first days the French 
were pushed back until their trench line fol- 
lowed the crests that bear the old forts, and 
at one point, at Douaumont, the Germans 
had actually got possession of one of the old 
forts; but the French trenches pass in front 
of this fort at a distance of but a few hundred 
yards. 

Now, in the first days of the battle the posi- 



THEY SHALL NOT PASS 107 

tion of the French on the east bank of the 
Meuse was just this: the troops facing north 
were meeting and slowly yielding to a terrific 
drive coming south and southwest; the rest of 
the troops that faced east toward the Woevre 
were not attacked severely. But as the Ger- 
mans came south, and when they took Douau- 
mont, they were able to reach the bridges 
across the Meuse behind the French troops 
on the Meuse Hills and to destroy them by in- 
direct fire, and these French troops, more than 
a hundred thousand probably, were fighting 
with their backs to a deep river and exposed 
to destruction in case their lines did not 
hold. 

In this situation Joffre proposed to take 
his troops behind the Meuse and on the hills 
to the west and above the city, leaving the 
city to the Germans. The French line would 
thus come north behind the Meuse from St. 
Mihiel and then turn west above Verdun, 
following either the Charny Ridge or else the 
Hills of Regret and Chaume, on either side 



108 THEY SHALL NOT PASS 

of the trough, described above, which the road 
to Paris follows. 

If Verdun were a fortress actually; if either 
the old town or the circle of forts outside had 
been of value, Joffre would not have pro- 
posed this thing. But they were of no value. 
Verdun was once a fortress barring the way to 
the Plain of Chalons, but the Germans were in 
the plain, having come through Belgium by 
the back door, as it were. The forts outside 
the city on the rim of the basin had already 
been abandoned because they could have 
been destroyed by German heavy artillery, 
as were those of Liege and Antwerp. Verdun 
was just a position; but it was a difficult 
position to defend because of the river, which 
cut off one-half the army and could be crossed 
only by bridges, which were under indirect 
fire. 

If the French had come back to the Charny 
Ridge, or even to the Regret Hills south of the 
trough followed by the Paris-Metz road, 
they would have stood on hills of patent 



THEY SHALL NOT PASS 109 

military value; the trough is a natural ditch 
in front. These hills are all trenched and pre- 
pared for defence. The French would merely 
have shortened their lines and taken an easy 
position to defend, instead of holding a bad 
position. But ultimately this would have 
meant the relinquishing of Verdun, the little 
town down in the valley below, now become 
a heap of ruins and having lost its military 
value thirty years earlier, when heavy artil- 
lery began its decisive success over the old 
fortifications. 

The French did not retire, because the civil 
government overruled the military; decided 
that the moral effect of the withdrawal from 
Verdun would be disastrous to the French 
and advantageous to the Germans. Instead 
of retiring, the French stood and held the 
hills beyond the Charny Ridge, Dead Man's 
and 304; they hold them still and seem deter- 
mined to keep them. But remember that 
they can still retire to the Charny Ridge if 
they choose, and only then find their best line 



110 THEY SHALL NOT PASS 

west of the Meuse, if they mean to hold on to 
the city of Verdun. 

On the other hand, east of the River Meuse 
the French are approximately in their last 
line. The hills and crests they hold upon the 
Meuse Hills are some three or four miles 
from Verdun, but if the French retired far 
they would begin to come down hill, with a 
deep river at their backs. Li consequence, 
whenever you hear that the Germans have 
made some slight gain, taken a trench about 
Douaumont or Vaux, you are certain to hear 
at once that the French have counter attacked 
and retaken the lost ground. 

The essential thing to remember is that the 
defence of Verdun is not the defence of a 
position that has a great military value. 
The French would be better off, would lose 
fewer men and run smaller risk of considerable 
losses if they should quit the east bank of the 
Meuse and occupy the hills back of Verdun 
on the west bank. On the west bank the 
Germans have never made any material 



THEY SHALL NOT PASS 111 

gain, and they have not come within reach 
of the hills that bear the old forts. But the 
French Government has decided that for 
political reason, for reasons that affect the 
moral, not the military, situation, Verdun 
must not be surrendered; hence the army is 
holding it at a cost of men less than the Ger- . 
mans are paying to take it, but at a far greater 
cost than would be necessary to hold the 
better positions west of the river. 

The Germans have not made any gain 
of importance in nearly two months. The 
French are very sure they will not come 
farther south. They are as confident as 
men could be. But if the Germans should 
come farther south and at last force the 
French to come back behind the river and 
to the hills above the town, they would only 
win a moral victory. The military situation 
would not be changed, unless they should also 
pierce the French lines on the west of the 
river, and this is absolutely unthinkable 
now. 



112 THEY SHALL NOT PASS 

If you think of Verdun city as a fortress 
you will put yourself in the eighteenth cen- 
tury. It is just an abandoned town, mostly 
ashes and completely ruined by a useless 
bombardment after the main German ad- 
vance had been checked. If you think of 
Verdun as a fortified position, like Liege, 
which, if it fell, would bring disaster, as did 
the fall of Liege, you are thinking in terms 
of the situation before the war. The forts 
of this position have all been abandoned and 
the French are fighting in trenches in all 
points save one outside this circle of forts. 
If you think of Verdun as the gateway to 
anything, you are thinking of something 
that doesn't exist. It was a gateway to 
Central France, to the Plain of Chalons, 
from the German frontier before the Ger- 
mans came down into the Plain of Chalons 
from the north through Belgium. 

But if you think of Verdun as a place 
which has a great sentimental value for both 
the French and the Germans; if you think 



THEY SHALL NOT PASS 113 

of it as a place which by reason of its import- 
ance in other days still preserves a value in 
the minds of the mass of the French and Ger- 
man publics, a town the taking of which 
would as a result of this wholly false appraisal 
be reckoned in Germany as a great victory, 
which would vastly encourage German masses 
and would be accepted in France as a great 
defeat which would equally depress the 
French public, you will think of the battle for 
Verdun as it is. 

If you go to Verdun you will see that 
the estimate that the world has placed 
upon it is illusory. You will see it is an 
abandoned town. You will see, as I did, 
that great and famous forts are without guns, 
and you will see, as I did, that the positions 
which the French have prepared behind the 
Meuse and above the town are vastly stronger 
than those which they have held successfully, 
in Lorraine or any other place where the at- 
tacks have been bitter, for nearly two years. 

There are no forts, fortifications, fortresses, 



114 THEY SHALL NOT PASS 

in this war. There are just trenches, and the 
Verdun sector is no exception. Verdun is not 
surrounded; it is not invested. I went to the 
town from Bar-le-Duc in an automobile with- 
out difficulty, and I ran back to Paris by 
another road, through Chalons, with equal 
ease. The Germans have never got within 
three miles of the town on any side; to the 
west of the River Meuse they are not within 
six miles of it. They are not gaining, and 
have not been gaining for weeks; they are 
merely fighting a desperate trench campaign, 
and the French are fighting back, retaking 
trenches on the east of the river, because 
they are in their last line on this bank of the 
river, but paying less attention to German 
trench gains on the west because the Ger- 
mans are still far from the Charny Ridge, 
their main position. 

If Verdun falls, that is, if the French are 
compelled under pressure or as a result of the 
cost of holding their present awkward posi- 
tion to go back behind the river, they will 



THEY SHALL NOT PASS 115 

lose fifty or a hundred square miles of French 
territory, they will lose all the tremendous 
value of the moral "lift" which the suc- 
cessful defence has brought, but they will lose 
nothing else; and when the Germans have 
taken Verdun, the ashes, the ruins, they will 
stop, because there is no object or value in 
further attack. They are fighting for moral 
values, and the French politician has over- 
ruled the French soldier and compelled him to 
accept battle on unfavorable ground for 
this same moral value, but against his mili- 
tary judgment. He has done it successfully. 
He expects and France expects that he will 
continue to do it successfully, but in the 
wholly remote contingency that he failed 
(I can only say that it is a contingency no 
longer considered in France), a loss in moral 
advantage would be the only consequence. 



V 

IN SIGHT OF THE PROMISED LAND- 
ON THE LORRAINE BATTLEFIELD 

IN THE third week of August, 1914, a 
French army crossed the frontier of Al- 
sace-Lorraine and entered the Promised 
Land, toward which all Frenchmen had 
looked in hope and sadness for forty-four 
years. The long-forgotten communiques of 
that early period of the war reported success 
after success, until at last it was announced 
that the victorious French armies had reached 
Sarrebourg and Morhange, and were astride 
the Strassburg-Metz Railroad. And then 
Berlin took up the cry, and France and the 
world learned of a great German victory and 
of the defeat and rout of the invading army. 
Even Paris conceded that the retreat had be- 
gun and the "army of liberation" was crowd- 
lie 



THEY SHALL NOT PASS 117 

ing back beyond the frontier and far within 
French territory. 

Then the curtain of the censorship fell and 
the world turned to the westward to watch 
the terrible battle for Paris. In the agony and 
glory of the Marne the struggle along the 
Moselle was forgotten; the Battle of Nancy, of 
Lorraine, was fought and won in the darkness, 
and when the safety of Paris was assured the 
world looked toward the Aisne, and then 
toward Flanders. So it came about that one 
of the greatest battles of the whole war, one of 
the most important of the French victories, 
the success that made the Marne possible, the 
rally and stand of the French armies about 
Nancy, escaped the fame it earned. Only in 
legend, in the romance of the Kaiser with his 
cavalry waiting on the hills to enter the Lor- 
raine capital, did the battle live. 

When I went to France one of the hopes I 
had cherished was that I might be permitted 
to visit this battlefield, to see the ground on 
which a great battle had been fought, that 



118 THEY SHALL NOT PASS 

was still unknown country, in the main, for 
those who have written on the war. The Lor- 
raine field was the field on which France and 
Germany had planned for a generation to 
fight. Had the Germans respected the neu- 
trality of Belgium, it is by Nancy, by the gap 
between the Vosges and the hills of the Meuse, 
that they must have broken into France. The 
Marne was a battlefield which was reached by 
chance and fought over by hazard, but every 
foot of the Lorraine country had been studied 
for the fight long years in advance. Here war 
followed the natural course, followed the 
plans of the general staff prepared years in ad- 
vance. Indeed, I had treasured over years a. 
plan of the Battle of Nancy, contained in a 
French book written years ago, which might 
serve as the basis for a history of what hap- 
pened, as it was written as a prophecy of 
what was to come. 

When the Great General Staff was pleased 
to grant my request to see the battlefield of 
Nancy I was advised to travel by train to that 



THEY SHALL NOT PASS 119 

town accompanied by an officer from the 
General Staff, and informed that I should 
there meet an officer of the garrison, who 
would conduct me to all points of interest and 
explain in detail the various phases of the con- 
ffict. Thus it fell out, and I have to thank 
Commandant Leroux for the courtesy and 
consideration which made this excursion suc- 
cessful. 

In peace time one goes from Paris to Nancy 
in five hours, and the distance is about that 
from New York to Boston, by Springfield. In 
war all is different, and the time almost 
doubled. Yet there are compensations. Think 
of the New York-Boston trip as bringing 
you beyond New Haven to the exact rear 
of battle, of battle but fifteen miles away, 
with the guns booming in the distance and the 
aeroplanes and balloons in full view. Think 
also of this same trip, which from Hartford to 
Worchester follows the line of a battle not yet 
two years old, a battle that has left its traces 
in ruined villages, in shattered houses. On 



120 THEY SHALL NOT PASS 

either side of the railroad track the graves de- 
scend to meet the embankments; you can 
mark the advance and the retreat by the 
crosses which fill the fields. The gardens that 
touch the railroad and extend to the rear of 
houses in the little towns are filled with 
graves. Each enclosure has been fought for at 
the point of the bayonet, and every garden 
wall recalls the Chateau of Hougoumont, at 
Waterloo. 

All this was two years ago, but there is to- 
day, also. East of Bar-le-Duc the main line is 
cut by German shell fire now. From Fort 
Camp des Romains above St. Mihiel German 
guns sweep the railroad near Commercy, and 
one has to turn south by a long detour, as if 
one went to Boston by Fitchburg, travel south 
through the country of Jeanne d'Arc] and re- 
turn by Toul, whose forts look out upon the 
invaded land. Thus one comes to Nancy by 
night, and only by night, for twenty miles 
beyond there are Germans and a German can- 
non, which not so long ago sent a shell into the 



THEY SHALL NOT PASS 121 

town and removed a whole city block beside 
the railroad station. It is the sight of this ruin 
as you enter the town which reminds you that 
you are at the front, but there are other re- 
minders. 

As w^e ate our dinner in the cafe, facing the 
beautiful Place Stanislas, we were disturbed 
by a strange and curious drumming sound. 
Going out into the square, we saw an aero- 
plane, or rather its lights, red and green, like 
those of a ship. It was the first of several, 
the night patrol, rising slowly and steadily, 
and then sweeping off in a wide curve toward 
the enemy's line. They were the sentries of 
the air which were to guard us while we slept, 
for men do sentry-go in the air as well as on 
the earth about the capital of Lorraine. Then 
the searchlights on the hills began to play, 
sweeping the horizon toward that same mys- 
terious region where beyond the darkness 
there is war. 

The next morning I woke with the sense of 
Fourth of July. Bang! Bang! Bang! Such 



122 THEY SHALL NOT PASS 

a barking of cannon crackers I had never 
heard. Still drowsy, I pushed open the French 
windows and looked down on the square* 
There I beheld a hundred or more men, women, 
and children, their eyes fixed on something in 
the air above and behind the hotel. Still the 
incessant barking of guns, with the occasional 
boom of something more impressive. With 
difficulty I grasped the fact. I was in the 
midst of a Taube raid. Somewhere over my 
head, invisible to me because of the wall of 
my hotel, a German aeroplane was flying, and 
all the anti-aircraft guns were shooting at it. 
Was it carrying bombs .^ Should I presently 
see or feel the destruction following the de- 
scent of these. f^ 

But the Taube turned away, the guns fired 
less and less frequently, the people in the 
streets drifted away, the children to school, 
the men to work, the women to wait. It was 
just a detail in their lives, as familiar as the in- 
coming steamer to the commuters on the 
North River ferryboats. Some portion of war 



THEY SHALL NOT PASS 123 

has been the day's history of Nancy for nearly 
two years now. The children do not carry gas 
masks to school with them as they do at Pont- 
a-Mousson, a dozen miles to the north, but 
women and children have been killed by Ger- 
man shells, by bombs, brought by Zeppelins 
and by aeroplanes. There is always excite- 
ment of sorts in the district of Nancy. 

After a breakfast, broken by the return of 
the aeroplanes we had seen departing the 
night before for the patrol, we entered our 
cars and set out for the front, for the near- 
front, for the lines a few miles behind the pres- 
ent trenches, where Nancy was saved but two 
years ago. Our route lay north along the val- 
ley of the Meurthe, a smiling broad valley, 
marching north and south and meeting in a 
few miles that of the Moselle coming east. It 
was easy to believe that one was riding 
through the valley of the Susquehanna, with 
spring and peace in the air. Toward the east 
a wall of hills shut out the view. This was the 
shoulder of the Grand Couronne, the wall 



124 THEY SHALL NOT PASS 

against which German violence burst and 
broke in September, 1914. 

Presently we came to a long stretch of road 
walled in on the river side by brown canvas, 
exactly the sort of thing that is used at foot- 
ball games to shut out the non-paying public. 
But it had another purpose here. We were 
within the vision of the Germans, across the 
river, on the heights behind the forest, which 
outlined itself at the skyline; there were the 
Kaiser's troops and that forest was the Bois- 
le-Pretre, the familiar incident in so many 
communiques since the war began. Thanks 
to the canvas, it was possible for the French to 
move troops along this road without inviting 
German shells. Yet it was impossible to de- 
rive any large feeling of security from a can- 
vas wall, which alone interposed between you 
and German heavy artillery. 

We passed through several villages and 
each was crowded with troops; cavalry, in- 
fantry, all the branches represented; it was 
still early and the soldiers were just beginning 



THEY SHALL NOT PASS 125 

their day's work; war is so completely a busi- 
ness here. Transport wagons marched along 
the roads, companies of soldiers filed by. In- 
terspersed with the soldiers were civilians, the 
women and children, for none of the villages 
are evacuated. Not even the occasional boom 
of a gun far off could give to this thing the 
character of real w^ar. It recalled the days of 
my soldiering in the militia camp at Framing- 
ham in Massachusetts. It was simply im- 
possible to believe that it was real. Even the 
faces of the soldiers were smiling. There was 
no such sense of terribleness, of strain and 
weariness as I later found about Verdun. The 
Lorraine front is now inactive, tranquil ; it has 
been quiet so long that men have forgotten all 
the carnage and horror of the earlier time. 

We turned out of the valley and climbed 
abruptly up the hillside. In a moment we 
came into the centre of a tiny village and 
looked into a row of houses, whose roofs 
had been swept off by shell fire. Here and 
there a whole house was gone; next door the 



126 THEY SHALL NOT PASS 

house was undisturbed and the women and 
children looked out of the doors. The village 
was St. Genevieve, and we were at the ex- 
treme front of the French in August, and 
against this hill burst the flood of German 
invasion. Leaving the car we walked out of 
the village, and at the end of the street a sign 
warned the wayfarer not to enter the fields, 
for which we were bound: "War — do not 
trespass." This was the burden of the 
warning. 

Once beyond this sign we came out sud- 
denly upon an open plateau, upon trenches. 
Northward the slope descended to a valley 
at our feet. It was cut and seamed by 
trenches, and beyond the trenches stood the 
posts that carried the barbed-wire entangle- 
ments. Here and there, amidst the trenches, 
there were graves. I went down to the 
barbed-wire entanglements and examined 
them curiously. They at least were real. 
Once thousands of men had come up out of the 
little woods a quarter of a mile below; they 



THEY SHALL NOT PASS 127 

had come on in that famous massed attack, 
they had come on in the face of machine gun 
and "seventy-fives." They had just reached 
the wires, which marked high water. In the 
woods below, the Bois de Facq, in the fields 
by the river 4,000 Germans had been buried. 
Looking out from the trenches the whole 
country unfolded. Northward the little vil- 
lage of Atton slept under the steep slope of 
C6te-de-Mousson, a round pinnacle crowned 
with an ancient chateau. From the hill the 
German artillery had swept the ground where 
I stood. Below the hill to the west was 
Pont-a-Mousson, the city of 150 bombard- 
ments, which the Germans took when they 
came south and lost later. Above it was the 
Bois-le-Pretre, in which guns were now boom- 
ing occasionally. Far to the north was an- 
other hill, just visible, and its slope toward 
us was cut and seamed with yellow slashes: 
Those were the French trenches, then of the 
second or third line; beyond there was still 
another hill, it was slightly blurred in the 



128 THEY SHALL NOT PASS 

haze, but it was not over five miles away, and 
it was occupied by the Germans. From 
the slope above me on a clear day it is possible 
to see Metz, so near are French and German 
lines to the old frontier. 

Straight across the river to the west of 
us was another wood, with a glorious name, 
the Forest of the Advance Guard. It swept 
to the south of us. In that wood the Ger- 
mans had also planted their guns on the day 
of battle. They had swept the trenches 
where I stood from three sides. Plainly it 
had been a warm corner. But the French 
had held on. Their commander had re- 
ceived a verbal order to retreat. He insisted 
that it should be put in writing, and this took 
time. The order came. It had to be obeyed, 
but he obeyed alowly. Reluctantly the 
men left the trenches they had held so long. 
They slipped southward along the road by 
which we had come. But suddenly their 
rear guards discovered the Germans were 
also retreating. So the French came back 



THEY SHALL NOT PASS 129 

and the line of St. Genevieve was held, the 
northern door to Nancy was not forced. 

Looking down again it was not difficult 
to reconstitute that German assault, made 
at night. The thing was so simple the 
civilian could grasp it. A road ran through 
the valley and along it the Germans had 
formed; the slope they had to advance up 
was gentle, far more gradual than that of 
San Juan. They had been picked troops 
selected for a forlorn hope, and they had 
come back four times. The next morning 
the whole forest had been filled with dead 
and dying. Not less than a division — 20,000 
men — had made the terrible venture. Now 
there was a strange sense of emptiness in the 
country; war had come and gone, left its 
graves, its trenches, its barbed-wire entan- 
glements; but these were all disappearing 
already. On this beautiful spring morning 
it was impossible to feel the reality of what 
happened here, what was happening now, 
in some measure, five miles or more to the 



130 THEY SHALL NOT PASS 

north. Nature is certainly the greatest of 
all pacifists; she will not permit the signs of 
war to endure nor the mind to believe that 
war itself has existed and exists. 

From St. Genevieve we went to the Grand 
Mont d'Amance, the most famous point in 
all the Lorraine front, the southeast corner 
of the Grand Couronne, as St. Genevieve is 
the northern. Here, from a hill some 1,300 
feet high, one looks eastward into the Prom- 
ised Land of France — into German Lorraine. 
In the early days of August the great French 
invasion, resting one flank upon this hill, the 
other upon the distant Vosges, had stepped 
over the frontier. One could trace its route 
to the distant hills among which it had found 
disaster. In these hills the Germans had 
hidden their heavy guns, and the French, 
coming under their fire without warning, 
unsupported by heavy artillery, which was 
lacking to them, had broken. Then the 
German invasion had rolled back. You 
could follow the route. In the foreground 



THEY SHALL NOT PASS 131 

the little Seille River could be discerned; 
it marked the old frontier. Across this 
had come the defeated troops. They had 
swarmed down the low, bare hills; they had 
crossed and vanished in the woods just at my 
feet; these woods were the Forest of Cham- 
penoux. Into this forest the Germans had 
followed by the thousand, they were astride 
the main road to Nancy, which rolled white 
and straight at my feet. But in the woods 
the French rallied. For days there was fought 
in this stretch of trees one of the most terrible 
of battles. 

As I stood on the Grand Mont I faced al- 
most due east. In front of me and to the 
south extended the forest. Exactly at my 
feet the forest reached up the hill and there 
was a little cluster of buildings about a 
fountain. All was in ruins, and here, ex- 
actly here, was the high water mark of the 
German advance. They had occupied the 
ruins for a few moments and then had 
been driven out. Elsewhere they had never 



132 THEY SHALL NOT PASS 

emerged from the woods; they had ap- 
proached the western shore, but the French 
had met them with machine guns and 
"seventy-fives." The brown woods at my 
feet were nothing but a vast cemetery; 
thousands of French and German soldiers 
slept there. 

In their turn the Germans had gone back. 
Now, in the same woods, a French battery 
was shelling the Germans on the other side of 
the Seille. Under the glass I studied the little 
villages unfolding as on a map; they were all 
destroyed, but it was impossible to recognize 
this. Some were French, some German; you 
could follow the line, but there were no 
trenches; behind them French shells were 
bursting occasionally and black smoke rose 
just above the ground. Thousands of men 
faced each other less than four miles from 
where I stood, but all that there was to be 
detected were the shell bursts; otherwise one 
saw a pleasant country, rolling hills, mostly 
without woods, bare in the spring, which 



THEY SHALL NOT PASS 133 

had not yet come to turn them green. In 
the foreground ran that arbitrary Hne Bis- 
marck had drawn between Frenchmen forty- 
six years before — the frontier — but of natural 
separation there was none. He had cut off a 
part of France, that was all, and one looked 
upon what had been and was still a bleeding 
wound. 

I asked the French commandant about the 
various descriptions made by those who have 
written about the war. They have described 
the German attack as mounting the slope of 
the Grand Mont, where we stood. He took 
me to the edge and pointed down. It was a 
cliff almost as steep as the Palisades. "C'est 
une blague," he smiled. ''Just a story." 
The Germans had not charged here, but in the 
forest below, where the Nancy road passed 
through and enters the valley of the Amezeule. 
They had not tried to carry but to turn the 
Grand Mont. More than £00,000 men had 
fought for days in the valley below. I asked 
him about the legend of the Kaiser, sitting on 



134 THEY SHALL NOT PASS 

a hill, waiting in white uniform with his 
famous escort, waiting until the road was 
clear for his triumphal entrance into the capi- 
tal of Lorraine. He laughed. I might choose 
my hill; if the Emperor had done this thing the 
hill was "over there," but had he? They are 
hard on legends at the front, and the tales that 
delight Paris die easily on the frontiers of war. 
But since I had asked so much about the 
fighting my commandant promised to take 
me in the afternoon to the point where the 
struggle had been fiercest, still farther to the 
south, where all the hills break down and there 
is a natural gateway from Germany into 
France, the beginning of the famous Charmes 
Gap, through which the German road to 
Paris from the east ran, and still runs. Leav- 
ing Nancy behind us, and ascending the 
Meurthe valley on the eastern bank, turning 
out of it before Saint Nicholas du Port, we 
came presently to the most completely war- 
swept fields that I have ever seen. On a 
perfectly level plain the little town of Har- 



THEY SHALL NOT PASS 135 

aucourt stands in sombre ruins. Its houses 
are nothing but ashes and rubble. Go out 
of the village toward the east and you enter 
fields pockmarked by shell fire. For several 
miles you can walk from shell hole to shell 
hole. The whole country is a patchwork of 
these shell holes. At every few rods a new 
line of old trenches approaches the road and 
wanders away again. Barbed-wire entangle- 
ments run up and down the gently sloping 
hillsides. 

Presently we came out upon a perfectly 
level field. It was simply torn by shell 
fire. Old half-filled trenches wandered aim- 
lessly about, and beyond, under a gentle 
slope, the little village of Courbessaux stood 
in ruins. The commandant called my at- 
tention to a bit of woods in front. 

"The Germans had their machine guns 
there," said he. "We didn't know it, and 
a French brigade charged across this field. 
It started at 8:15, and at 8:30 it had lost 
more than 3,000 out of 6,000. Then the 



136 THEY SHALL NOT PASS 

Germans came out of the woods in their 
turn, and our artillery, back at Haraucourt, 
caught them and they lost 3,500 men in a 
quarter of an hour. Along the roadside 
were innumerable graves. We looked at 
one. It was marked: "Here 196 French." 
Twenty feet distant was another; it was 
marked: "Here 196 Germans." In the field 
where we stood I was told some 10,000 men 
are buried. They were buried hurriedly, and 
even now when it rains arms and legs are 
exposed. 

Two years had passed, almost two years, 
since this field had been fought for. The 
Germans had taken it. They had ap- 
proached Haraucourt, but had not passed 
it. This was the centre and the most vital 
point in the Lorraine battle. What Foch's 
troops had done about La Fere Champe- 
noise, those of Castelnau had done here. 
The German wave had been broken, but 
at what cost? And now, after so many 
months, the desolation of war remained. 



THEY SHALL NOT PASS 137 

But yet it was not to endure. Beside the 
very graves an old peasant was ploughing, 
guiding his plough and his horses carefully 
among the tombs. Four miles away more 
trenches faced each other and the battle went 
on audibly, but behind this line, in this very 
field where so many had died, life was be- 
ginning. 

Later we drove south, passing within the 
lines the Germans had held in their great 
advance, we travelled through Luneville, 
which they had taken and left unharmed, 
save as shell fire had wrecked an eastern 
suburb. We visited Gerbeviller, where in 
an excess of rage the Germans had burned 
every structure in the town. I have never 
seen such a headquarters of desolation. 
Everything that had a shape, that had a 
semblance of beauty or of use, lies in com- 
plete ruin, detached houses, a chateau, the 
blocks in the village, all in ashes. Save for 
Sermaize, Gerbeviller is the most completely 
wrecked town in France. 



138 THEY SHALL NOT PASS 

You enter the village over a little bridge 
across the tiny Mortagne. Here some French 
soldiers made a stand and held off the Ger- 
man advance for some hours. There was 
no other battle at Gerbeviller, but for this 
defence the town died. Never was death 
so complete. Incendiary material was placed 
in every house, and all that thoroughness 
could do to make the destruction complete 
was done. Gerbeviller is dead, a few women 
and children live amidst its ashes, there is a 
wooden barrack by the bridge with a post- 
office and the inevitable postcards, but only 
on postcards, picture postcards, does the 
town live. It will be a place of pilgrimage 
when peace comes. 

From Gerbeviller we went by Bay on to the 
Plateau of Saffais, the ridge between the 
Meurthe and the Moselle, where the defeated 
army of Castelnau made its last and success- 
ful stand. The French line came south from 
St. Genevieve, where we had been in the 
morning, through the Grand Mont, across 



THEY SHALL NOT PASS 139 

the plain by Haraucourt and Corbessaux, 
then crossed the Meurthe by Dombasle and 
stood on the heights from Rossieres south. 
Having taken Luneville, the Germans at- 
tempted to cross the Meurthe coming out of 
the Forest of Vitrimont. 

Standing on the Plateau of Saffais and 
facing east, the whole country unfolded 
again, as it did at the Grand Mont. The 
face of the plateau is seamed with trenches. 
They follow the slopes, and the village of 
Saffais stands out like a promontory. On 
this ridge the French had massed three 
hundred cannon. Their army had come 
back in ruins, and to steady it they had been 
compelled to draw troops from Alsace. 
Mulhausen was sacrificed to save Nancy. 
Behind these crests on which we stood a 
beaten army, almost routed, had in three 
days found itself and returned to the charge. 

In the shadow of the dusk I looked across 
the Meurthe into the brown mass of the For- 
est of Vitrimont. Through this had come 



140 THEY SHALL NOT PASS 

the victorious Germans. They had de- 
bouched from the wood; they had approached 
the river, hidden under the slope, but, swept 
by the hell of this artillery storm, they had 
broken. But few had lived to pass the river, 
none had mounted the slopes. There were 
almost no graves along these trenches. After- 
ward the Germans had in turn yielded to 
pressure from the south and gone back. Be- 
fore the Battle of the Marne began the Ger- 
man wave of invasion had been stopped here 
in the last days of August. A second terrific 
drive, coincident with the Marne, had like- 
wise failed. Then the Germans had gone 
back to the frontier. The old boundary line 
of Bismarck is now in many instances an 
actual line of fire, and nowhere on this front 
are the Germans more than three or four miles 
within French territory. 

If you should look at the map of the wholly 
imaginary Battle of Nancy, drawn by Colonel 
Boucher to illustrate his book, published 
before 1910, a book describing the problem 



THEY SHALL NOT PASS 141 

of the defence of the eastern frontier, you will 
find the lines on which the French stood at 
Saffais indicated exactly. Colonel Boucher 
had not dreamed this battle, but for a gener- 
ation the French General Staff had planned 
it. Here they had expected to meet the 
German thrust. When the Germans decided 
to go by Belgium they had in turn taken the 
offensive, but, having failed, they had fought 
their long-planned battle. 

Out of all the region of war, of war to-day 
and war yesterday, one goes back to Nancy, 
to its busy streets, its crowds of people re- 
turning from their day's work. War is less 
than fifteen miles away, but Nancy is as calm 
as London is nervous. Its bakers still make 
macaroons; even Taube raids do not excuse 
the children from punctual attendance at 
school. Nancy is calm with the calmness of 
all France, but with just a touch of something 
more than calmness, which forty-six years of 
living by an open frontier brings. Twenty- 
one months ago it was the gauge of battle, 



142 THEY SHALL NOT PASS 

and half a million men fought for it; a new 
German drive may approach it at any time. 
Out toward the old frontier there is still a 
German gun, hidden in the Forest of Bezange, 
which has turned one block to ashes and may 
fire again at any hour. Zeppelins have come 
and gone, leaving dead women and children 
behind them, but Nancy goes on with to-day. 
And to-morrow. f^ In the hearts of all the 
people of this beautiful city there is a single 
and a simple faith. Nancy turns her face 
toward the ancient frontier, she looks hope- 
fully out upon the shell-swept Grand Cour- 
onne and beyond to the Promised Land. 
And the people say to you, if you ask them 
about war and about peace, as one of them 
said to me: "Peace will come, but not until 
we have our ancient frontier, not until we 
have Metz and Strassburg. We have waited 
a long time, is it not so? " 



THE COtTNIRY LIFE PRESS, GARDEN CITY, NEW YORK 



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